Gerald K. Letendre

Dr. Gerald K LeTendre, Professor of Education, is chair of the Educational Policy Studies Department at The Pennsylvania State University. He is currently an associate editor of The American Journal of Education and serves on the editorial board for the Comparative Education Review. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude) in sociology from Harvard University and was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to do fieldwork among Tibetan refugees. He completed his graduate work at Stanford University where he received his Master’s (sociology) and Ph.D. (education). He has been the recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship, a Johann Jacobs Young Scholar Award, a Spencer Post-doctoral Fellowship, and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Bremen in Germany (2003-2004). Dr. LeTendre has published on a broad range of topics in comparative and international education, including “What is tracking? Cultural expectations in the U.S., Germany and Japan” (American Educational Research Journal); “The policy trap: National educational policy and the third international math and science study” (International Journal of Educational Policy Research and Practice). His most recent books include National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and Current and Future Institutional Trends in Mass Schooling (with David Baker, Stanford University Press), Learning to be Adolescent: Growing Up in U.S. and Japanese Middle Schools (Yale University Press), and (with Becky Fukuzawa, Routledge/Farmer Press) Intense Years: How Japanese Adolescents Balance School, Work and Friends. His current research interests include changing work roles for teachers cross-nationally and the diffusion of prevention programs in schools worldwide.