Joseph A Rochford

Joseph A. Rochford is Vice-President of the Stark Education Partnership, one of the United States' largest local education reform support organizations. Founded in 1989 by the Timken, Hoover, Deuble, and Stark Community Foundations, the mission of the partnership is to mobilize private sector resources to help Stark County’s districts and schools build the capacity to initiate and sustain changes resulting in high student achievement. In this regard, the partnership works in a P-16 context in Ohio’s seventh largest county with 17 public school districts and five institutions of higher education, enrolling over 100,000 students.

An award-winning collegiate journalist, Joseph Rochford received his Bachelor’s degree from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. Following graduation, he joined the staff of the Ohio R-94 project in Berea, the nation’s first small town Federal urban renewal effort. Following his service with that project, he returned to Baldwin-Wallace College to become associate director of their college union. He later served as coordinator of student activities, and director of academic and cultural events. While at B-W, he earned a Master’s degree in Higher Education Administration from Kent State University.

Leaving Baldwin-Wallace, he accepted a position with Ameri-Rents Incorporated in Olmsted Township, Ohio and subsequently became general manager of that firm. During his eight years of service, he increased corporate and business accounts by 400% and the firm grew into one of the largest general equipment rental firms in the State of Ohio.

After Ameri-Rents Incorporated, he returned to Kent State University to pursue his doctorate full-time. The College of Education awarded a series of assistantships to Dr. Rochford to work on a variety of projects with school districts in the region. He worked with administrative preparation programs in both the Cleveland Municipal and Canton City School District. He also was awarded a fellowship by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation to work as evaluation coordinator for its public education initiative. While at Kent, he became a member of the team developing the Decision Processes Instrument (DPI) to assess how organizations make decisions under conditions of high uncertainty. Work using the DPI is still in progress today.

Awarded a University Fellowship by Kent State on the basis of his research, Dr. Rochford joined the Stark Education Partnership in 1991 as a staff consultant. He subsequently held the positions of director of evaluation and reporting and deputy director before becoming vice-president.

Dr. Rochford has served on numerous community organizations and boards. He was co-chair of the committee which designed Choices High School in Canton, a highly successful diploma program for dropouts and has helped facilitate processes by working councils and community groups that resulted in over $5 million in local, state, and federal funding. In 1997, he became program advisor for the $10 million Timken Foundation grant to their namesake high school, at that time the largest single private foundation grant ever given to a public school. In 2004, he became the only internal early college high school technical assistance coach in Ohio, under a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

A Fulbright Senior Specialist, he has presented both nationally and internationally on issues of school reform. Most recently, he presented at the Kisubi Brothers University Centre of Uganda’s Martyrs University on collaboration and at the University of London on introducing pre-service teaching into global virtual communities.

He has authored several articles and “white papers,” including a Federal Approach to P-16 for the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. He is the author of the P-16: The Last Education Reform series of e-books available through ERIC and at www.edpartner.org.