Dr. Jane Ashdown was elected to The Early Years Institute Board of Directors in March 2010.

 

Prior to accepting her Adelphi appointment, Dr. Ashdown served as university dean of academic affairs for teacher education at The City University of New York (CUNY) from 2007 to 2009, and oversaw system-wide teacher education initiatives including the CUNY Teaching Opportunity Program and the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. She was responsible for promoting cross-campus collaborations and teacher education partnerships with public schools. She played an active role in promoting greater accountability for quality teacher education, and represented the university at the state-level, as well as supported accreditation processes.

In her career, she spent 16 years in various capacities at New York University’s (NYU) Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. In the early 90s, she was the principal investigator and director of Reading Recovery, an early literacy intervention, which was implemented in public schools across New York City and the metropolitan area. In her role as director of the Ruth Horowitz Center for Teacher Development, she initiated a mentoring network for teacher education graduates in their first teaching positions. She raised considerable private foundation support and made literacy a hallmark of her career through publications and conference presentations. From 2004 to 2007, she was vice chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning, the major teacher preparation department with 56 faculty and more than 1,200 students.

Dr. Ashdown’s expertise and current research is focused on teacher development and learning and on improving first-grade reading achievement through early literacy intervention. Her publications, conference papers, and presentations on this work have been recognized and supported by more than a dozen grants. In 2003, she was a co-recipient of the NYU Daniel Griffiths Research Award recognizing her contribution to educational research on the role of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis in education.

She earned her Ph.D. degree in interdisciplinary studies in human development from the University of Pennsylvania; advanced diploma in early childhood education and post-graduate certificate in primary education from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London; and B.A. degree, with honors, in modern history, economics, and politics from the University of Manchester, England.