Regie Stites

Regie Stites, Ph.D., is a senior researcher in SRI International’s Center for Education Policy. He has two decades of experience in the design and management of large-scale educational research and evaluation in the areas of literacy education, integrated academic and career-technical education, college and career readiness, and workforce development.

Since 1997, Stites has been directing research studies for the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institute for Literacy, numerous state departments of education and labor, foundations, and private clients. Major projects include the Evaluation of the California Community College Linked Learning Initiative, the Evaluation of the California Linked Learning District Initiative, the Content-Rich Vocabulary Project Evaluation, and the Equipped for the Future National Work Readiness Credential Assessment Development and Validation.

Before joining SRI, Stites was a senior researcher at the National Center on Adult Literacy, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. His research addressed adult literacy standards, literacy skills retention, applications of advanced technologies to adult learning, and evaluation of effective practices in adult basic literacy instruction. In the early 1990s, Stites was a researcher in the national Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducted research on standards policy and performance assessment. He also has experience as a college instructor in the United States (comparative education, qualitative research methods) and in the People’s Republic of China (English composition, American literature, applied linguistics).

Stites holds a doctorate in education from UCLA, a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, a master’s degree in English/TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) from San Francisco State University, and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Illinois. For his doctoral dissertation, he conducted a six-month ethnographic study of literacy practices and nonformal adult literacy education in a rural community in Fujian Province, PRC.