Joe Willhoft, Executive Director Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium

Joe Willhoft is the Executive Director for the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium.  For the six years prior to that he was assistant superintendent for assessment and student information for the state of Washington, where his responsibilities included design and implementation of Washington’s assessment program and collection and reporting of student information for the state’s longitudinal student database.  Before moving to state-level work, Joe directed assessment and evaluation activities at the local level for more than twenty years, primarily in the Tacoma School District in Washington and in Charles County schools in Maryland. 

Joe has a doctorate in educational measurement and statistics from the University of Maryland.  He is past president of the Maryland Assessment Group and the Washington Educational Research Association, and was a founding member of the AERA Special Interest Group for Classroom-Based Assessment.  He has been involved in several collaborative data and assessment efforts, including the Technical Work Group for a congressionally-mandated evaluation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and as chair of the NAEP Policy Task Force for the National Assessment Governing Board, a collaborative effort co-sponsored by the Board and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  Joe has served on the Technical Advisory Committee for several states.

He has a master’s degree in Special Education, and in his more than forty-year career has taught at all grade levels from kindergarten to graduate school – his favorite being third grade.  He and Mark Twain share the same birthday.