Professor James Ryan, an expert in education and constitutional law, is a member of the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, a group tasked with examining how to make public education both excellent and equitable.

“It's not a small task, as you might imagine, and has us looking at issues ranging from international comparisons of performance to how states distribute education funding, to just about everything in between,” Ryan said. “The ultimate hope is that we will come up with a set of recommendations regarding the steps we need to take as a country in order to improve the quality of education offered in our schools and to eliminate the glaring gaps in educational opportunity that now exist.”

Ryan, who recently published the book “Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America,” said his experience on the commission forced him to think about how to translate research and theory into practice.

“There is nothing like the pressure to produce plausible recommendations to force you to think long and hard about what might actually work,” he said. “I believe that process has helped me a great deal in the classroom and in my research.”