John B. Willett

John Barry Willett is a retired U.S.-based professor of education, who—during his active career—specialized in the teaching, development and application of quantitative methods in the social sciences.

He was born in 1947 in Leeds but raised from the age of 10 in the nearby town of Harrogate, in the county of Yorkshire, in the North of England. He attended Woodlands Elementary School and then completed his secondary education at Harrogate Grammar School, where he served as Head Boy and Captain of the Rugby Team. Subsequently, he was awarded a Venning Exhibition to study physics at Worcester College, Oxford University from 1967 through 1970. Briefly, after graduating from Oxford—from 1970 through 1971—he became a professional musician, playing bass guitar in a short-lived rock n'roll band named "e. Bo Jobb," based in Bradford, also in the North of England.

Willett then taught high-school physics and mathematics at the Island School, Hong Kong, from 1972 through 1978, and also served as Housemaster of the Da Vinci House. He went on to train in-service teachers of physics in the School of Education at Hong Kong University, from 1978 through 1980. While serving in Hong Kong, he authored a physics textbook for students in Hong Kong schools, entitled "A New School Physics for Hong Kong," published by Ling Kee Press, and hosted the popular weekly TV science-magazine show, "Tomorrow's World," each Sunday evening, on Hong Kong's TVB Pearl. The show was sponsored by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. He moved to the USA in 1980, with his wife and daughter, to attend graduate school at Stanford University. At Stanford, he was awarded a master's degree in statistics and a doctorate in quantitative methods, graduating with the latter in 1985.

From 1985, he was a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education,[1] eventually rising to the position of full professor, with an endowed chair and the title of Charles William Eliot Professor of Education.[2] Willett is an expert in the application of statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal data and in quantitative methods for making causal inferences from data. During his career, he wrote or co-wrote five books and more than 130 peer-reviewed academic papers and taught popular courses in applied quantitative methods to more than 3,000 graduate students throughout Harvard University and MIT. These included courses on answering questions with quantitative data, applied data analysis, applied longitudinal data analysis and causal inference. Later in his career, he served as Academic Dean of the School of Education for two years, under Dean Jerry Murphy, and as Acting Dean in Murphy's place for one year, under President Larry Summers.

In 1990, through the auspices of the Harvard Seminar on Assessment -- along with colleagues Judith D. Singer and Richard J. Light -- Willett authored the book By Design: Planning Research on Higher Education. The Harvard Assessment Seminar was established by Harvard President Derek Bok, in the late 1980s, to identify, address and offer solutions to the topical issue of systematic assessment in higher education. It was organized and chaired by Professor Richard J. Light and attended regularly by more than 100 university faculty and administrators from twenty universities around the USA, and by representatives of selected State and Federal Agencies. "By Design" was the authors' contribution to the seminar's purpose. The book was written to facilitate the conduct of superior research in higher education and was dedicated specifically to the proposition that "you can't fix by analysis, what you bungled by design." That is, it doesn't matter how much data you collect and how good you are at analysis, if you didn't get the research design and data-collection right! To support their thesis, the authors presented, and dissected, many concrete examples of excellent prior research projects in higher education and laid out a systematic framework for designing effective new research.

In 1991, Willett and his collaborators Richard Murnane, Judith Singer, James Kemple and Randall Olsen published a comprehensive portrait of the careers of more than 50,000 teachers who were serving in America's public schools, based on extensive survival analyses of longitudinal teaching records. The book was titled Who Will Teach? and was published by Harvard University Press. In it, the authors express great concern for the state of teaching profession in the USA because their analyses revealed that academically talented college graduates tended to avoid teaching as a career and, even among those who entered the profession, the most talented left early, especially in the scientific fields. They argued that current teacher licensing and certification policies stifled innovation and disincentivized entry into teaching at the outset. However, they also argued that, with appropriate incentives, they believed that these trends could be ameliorated and possibly reversed. In addition to improved salaries, the authors supported the widening of alternative paths into the teaching profession, improving school-district recruiting strategies and focusing on the teaching skills of candidates for entry into the teaching profession rather than simply on their prior academic success.

In 2003, Willett and his continuing close collaboratorJudy Singer, authored a seminal volume entitled Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence.[3] Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis was published world-wide by Oxford University Press, to excellent reviews and much success. It received honorable mention from the American Publishers Association for the best mathematics and statistics book of 2003. Its main thesis was that -- to document the importance and impact of education effectively -- one needed to collect systematically and analyze carefully longitudinal data on the participants in the process, whether they be students, parents, teachers or administrators. To support their thesis, the authors laid out detailed quantitative methods for succeeding at this effort. They argued that two important questions must always be asked of participants in the educational enterprise: (a) How fast are they changing over time, (b) when do they experience critical events during the educational process? Addressing such questions from empirical data is not necessarily easy nor straightforward. To rectify this, in the book, the authors provide a detailed presentation of the methods of individual growth modeling and survival analysis, respectively, using research questions and data-examples drawn from the field. The book has remained highly influential to the present day, and has been cited in thousands of applications and projects over that time.

Most recently, Willett and his colleague, Richard J. Murnane, have published a new book that presents and describes better methods for making causal inferences from empirical data in social and educational research. Their book is entitled Methods Matter: Improving Causal Inference in Educational and Social Research was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press It was dedicated to the proposition that empirical evidence for the success of educational interventions is only credible if it can truly support causal conclusions. The book is organized around important substantive research questions in education and uses detailed accounts of exemplary research from a wide variety of fields to describe the optimal design of true experiments, to introduce the concept of natural experiments and regression-discontinuity strategies, to describe the rationale and implementation of instrumental-variables estimation and lay out stratification and propensity-score methods for selection bias correction.

Willett retired from his active teaching and research at Harvard University in 2013 and now lives in Santa Cruz, California, enjoying the sun and spending time with his wife and his grandchildren. In his retirement, he continues to follow -- and is extremely proud of -- the outstanding careers of the thousands of students he taught and advised over the years, and he feels privileged that he was granted such a wonderful life.