Scott F. Abernathy was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, he volunteered for three months with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India. After graduation, hoping to do service work closer to home, Scott worked as an on-street counselor with homeless adolescents in Boston, Massachusetts. Scott then received an M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and subsequently taught fourth and seventh grades in Wisconsin public schools. Hoping to learn more about the underlying systems that drove the educational outcomes he was trying to change, Scott completed an M.P.A. in domestic policy and then a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.
Scott is now an associate professor of political science and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. He is also the author of School Choice and the Future of American Democracy and No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools, both from University of Michigan Press. His current research explores the possibilities and challenges of moving beyond comparative grade-based assessment in PK–12 education. As part of that, Scott is about to embark on designing his first learning adventure game.
