Education wonk Sara Mead is joining the New America Foundation as a senior research fellow studying education, workforce, and family issues.

Mead, 28, has received notice for contending that the "crisis" in boys' education is overblown and for her criticism, with Andrew Rotherham, of the ranking system used annually to determine Newsweek's "100 Best High Schools." "We have found that many schools in Newsweek's ranking have high dropout rates or glaring achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups," they wrote last week on Washingtonpost.com. "At the same time, many schools that fail to make the Newsweek list may be doing a better job educating all of their students." Most recently, Mead and Rotherham have been involved in Education Sector, a think tank that Rotherham founded in 2005 with former U.S. News & World Report writer Thomas Toch. Before that, both Mead and Rotherham were with the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive Policy Institute...

At New America, Mead will be working with Michael Dannenberg, a former education aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and David Gray, a onetime assistant secretary for policy at the Labor Department..

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