Bruno V. Manno
Trustee Emeritus
Walton Family Foundation
Bruno V. Manno is a Trustee Emeritus of Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Senior Advisor to the Foundation's K-12 Education Reform Initiative at the Walton Family Foundation. He previously worked as the Senior Program Associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to that, he served as the executive director of the Congressionally-appointed National Commission on the Costs of Higher Education and before that as the executive director of the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. He has also been a Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute where he was a member of the four-person team involved in the Project on "Charter Schools in Action," a national study of charter schools conducted by the Hudson Institute. He is the co-author (along with Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Gregg Vanourek) of Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education, published by Princeton University Press.
Prior to his appointment with the Hudson Institute, Dr. Manno was Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy and Planning in the United States Department of Education. In that post, he was a principal advisor to both Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and Deputy Secretary of Education David Kearns on policy matters as well as planning and evaluation services. He served in that capacity for almost a year prior to his confirmation.
Dr. Manno began working with then Secretary-Designate Alexander in February 1991. He directed the work of the team that created AMERICA 2000, President Bush's strategy to achieve the Nation's six education goals. He then served as Special Assistant to Secretary Alexander before becoming Assistant Secretary of Education.
Dr. Manno first came to the U.S. Department of Education in 1986 as Director of Planning for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). He then held several senior policy and management positions in that office, including Chief of Staff and Acting Assistant Secretary.
A graduate of the University of Dayton (B.A., 1970; M.A., 1972), Dr. Manno received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1975. From 1975 to 1978, he was a member of the faculty at the University of Dayton (Ohio). He then undertook post-doctoral studies for one year, which included appointments as Visiting Senior Lecturer at Catholic Teachers College in Sydney, Australia (now The Catholic University of Australia), Visiting Research Associate at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and Visiting Lecturer at the Institute for Catholic Educational Leadership at the University of San Francisco. From 1979 to 1986, Dr. Manno was Director of Research, Data Bank, and In-service Programs for the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) in Washington, D.C.
He is the author of over 150 articles and nearly 40 book reviews, co-editor of a book, co-author of two major reports on education supported by the Ford Foundation and published by NCEA. He also compiled annual statistical reports on Catholic schools for six of his nearly seven years with NCEA.