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Barbara Schneider is a Senior Fellow at NORC and is the John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. She worked for 18 years at the University of Chicago, holding positions as a Professor in Sociology and Human Development and as a senior researcher at NORC. She also continues to direct the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work at Michigan State University, an initiative that began at the University of Chicago where she was the co-director.
Professor Schneider uses a sociological lens to understand societal conditions and interpersonal interactions that create norms and values that enhance human and social capital. Her research focuses on how the social contexts of schools and families influence the academic and social well-being of adolescents as they move into adulthood. Currently she is working with the Michigan Department of Education on how to use their administrative education data to improve education decision making and is conducting a research demonstration project on building a college going culture in high schools. Schneider also is the principal investigator of NORC's Center on Advancing Research in Communication in Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (ARC) and previously served as principal investigator of the Data Research and Development Center (DRDC) at NORC, where she also had primary responsibility for designing instrumentation for the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) dataset base-year and first-year follow-up and led part of NORC's Analysis of National Education Longitudinal Studies (NELS) Data. She has conducted several program evaluations, including an NSF-funded evaluation of the National Academies' Center for Education (CFE) and an evaluation of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program on Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families.
Professor Schneider has published 15 books and over 100 articles and reports on family, social context of schooling, and sociology of knowledge. She is the past editor of Sociology of Education and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Currently, Schneider serves on the governing councils of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) and the international postdoctoral Pathways to Adulthood program and is an elected member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Council. She also has served on numerous committees at the National Academy of Sciences, most recently the National Academies' Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences Committee on Common Metrics in the Social Sciences and the National Research Council's FERPA Workshop Committee. Schneider received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2007 and was selected as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2009.