Tom Barrett, Director
Tom Barrett spent three decades helping build the department of accountability and research in Riverside Unified School District. When he began in 1977, the district had 25,000 students. It has since doubled in size, with a dramatic increase in both the number of English learners and low-income students.
Though Barrett retired as director of the Department of Educational Accountability in 2007, the district often calls upon him for help. Riverside administrators appreciate his knack for making complex data understandable to all audiences—from school board members to teachers and parents.
Barrett has both people skills and technical expertise. When he realized that teachers had difficulty using the standard assessment reporting system, he took their concerns to heart. He implemented a new, more teacher-friendly
reporting system—to the delight of the teachers and the school administration.
Barrett’s successes in Riverside did not go unnoticed. In 2001, he was appointed to the California Department of Education’s Regional Assessment Network, where he provided input during the implementation of the state's assessment systems.
As president of the California Educational Research Association in 2008, Barrett provided leadership to evaluators from a wide variety of school districts, including large districts like Los Angeles and San Diego and small, rural ones that had scarce resources but great needs.
Though he has served at the highest educational levels in the state, Barrett says that he most enjoys working on the front lines. Sometimes, he laughs, people think “PhDs in psychometric theory are not ‘regular people.’” Barrett’s ability to put technical information in terms that lay people can understand and persuade even the most skeptical teachers has made school administrators up and down the state change their minds about that.
