Mabry, Linda

(b. 1948, Austin, Texas). Ph.D. Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; B.Ed., University of Houston.

Mabry is the great-granddaughter of the proprietor of one of Austin's first five businesses, Weed's Livery and Undertaking. Her own undertaking was education, beginning when she was 10 years old and teaching younger siblings and neighbors in her backyard “Sunshine Club.” A decade later, she was teaching third grade full-time as an intern in a racially transitional, impoverished north Houston school, for which she was named the Outstanding Graduating Senior in the College of Education at the University of Houston. She stayed home with her three children until they had all entered school and, after a 7-year hiatus, returned to teaching in Illinois.

With an interest in how computers might enhance individualized learning, she left the classroom 6 years later to complete a master's degree in computer-assisted instruction. Discouraged by the state of educational technology in the mid-1980s but stimulated by academic thinking and research, she began doctoral studies in aesthetic foundations, then switched to program evaluation, beginning with the evaluation of arts education programs as a teaching and research assistant in the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation. When her evaluations of educational programs revealed the destructive power of high-stakes standardized testing, she moved into the field of K-12 student assessment. In that field, Phi Delta Kappa recognized with an Outstanding Dissertation designation her first research, an examination of a teacher-developed performance assessment system at Walden III High School in Racine, Wisconsin.

In the areas of research and evaluation, she found stimulating the debates regarding ethics and professional responsibility (particularly regarding advocacy) in an era that recognizes the mutability of truth and questions authority. Her thinking and contributions have especially focused on ethics, postmodernism, and their intersection with methodology, validity, advocacy, and responsibility. In the area of assessment of student achievement, admiring especially Sam Messick's work regarding consequential validity, she has concentrated on performance assessment, validity, and high-stakes testing for educational accountability.

Her research and evaluation has resulted in a book on each topic and has been conducted with research grants or fellowships from the Spencer Foundation–National Academy of Education, National Endowment for the Arts, Proffitt Endowment, Bagley Endowment, Washington Educational Research Association, State of Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ameritech Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Corporation, and others. She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association, the Board of Directors of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, and the Performance Assessment Review Board of New York City. She was part of the team that authored AEA's first public statement on high-stakes testing, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation.