Ellen Forte (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is the CEO & Chief Scientist of edCount, LLC, the consulting firm she founded in 2003. Dr. Forte’s work focuses on validity evaluation and on policies for how students, including those with disabilities and English learners, engage in instructional and assessment contexts. She particularly specializes in designing, developing, and evaluating assessments for alignment quality.
Dr. Forte has served as a senior advisor to several large assessment projects funded by the US Department of Education, including the Stackable, Instructionally-embedded, Portable Science (SIPS) project funded by a Competitive Grant for State Assessment in fall 2020, and has been a federal peer reviewer for education standards and assessments, accountability systems, state longitudinal data systems, and graduation rates. Dr. Forte serves on the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Board of Directors and on the Technical Advisory Committees for six US states, ACT, Project Lead the Way, and the UK Standards and Testing Agency as well as on the editorial boards for Educational Measurement (5th edition), Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, Applied Measurement in Education, and the NCME Newsletter. Dr. Forte wrote The Administrators’ Guide to Federal Programs for English Learners, first published in 2010 and revised in 2017, which addresses intersections among civil rights laws, education policy, and measurement and evaluation issues for English learners.
Prior to founding edCount, Dr. Forte was the Title I evaluator in the Connecticut Department of Education, the Director of Student Assessment for the Baltimore City Public Schools, and a project director with vendors in the teacher certification and student assessment sectors.