Kirk Vandersall is founder and Director of Arroyo Research Services, providing research, measurement, and evaluation services to education organizations and the institutions that serve them. Vandersall has over 20 years of experience leading evaluations and policy studies at the federal, state and local levels, including: ChickTech High School, an advocacy program designed to encourage girls to become information technology professionals, the Texas Dropout Recovery Pilot Program, one to one computing initiatives in Sunnyside, Arizona and Huntsville, Alabama, Learning Forward’s Transforming Professional Learning, more than 10 National Science Foundation (NSF) projects including STEM, Inc. (a middle school business incubator and STEM initiative of CSU Fullerton and Anaheim Union High School District) and Advancing Teachers of Mathematics to Advance Learning for All, multiple Math Science Partnerships, FILTERED, an interactive genomics game being developed by the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology with funding from the National Institutes of Health, and Migrant Education Program evaluations including for Collier County (Florida), the states of Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi and New York, and the national migrant education program evaluation funded by the U.S. Department of Education. He led the development and implementation of a Curriculum Management Plan for the Baltimore County Public Schools and led the Effective Practices Team of the National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers at Northeastern University.

Vandersall specialized in state and local policy studies at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center in New York City, where he led education policy studies throughout the country. Prior to forming ARS, Vandersall was a founding partner of Metiri Group, a national education technology consulting firm, where he was also Practice Leader for Metiri Group Research and Evaluation. For the Milken Family Foundation, Vandersall established and led the research office of the Milken Exchange on Educational Technology. He also established an office of Assessment and Evaluation for a large urban school district in Los Angeles County, taught graduate-level policy analysis and evaluation, served as a Subject Matter Expert for the APQC Evaluating Professional Learning Communities Study and the Grant Professional Certification, and published Post-Brown School Finance Reform in Strategies for Equity: Creating Productive Schools in a Just Society, Yale University Press.