Gordon A. MacInnes has devoted four decades to government service and leadership on issues related to education, poverty, and urban living. Prior to becoming a fellow at The Century Foundation, he served from 2002 to April 2007 as assistant commissioner for Abbott Implementation for the New Jersey Department of Education, where he oversaw a division that was created to better coordinate the implementation of Abbott v. Burke, the nation’s most prescriptive and sweeping state supreme court ruling on school finance, and improve academic achievement in the state’s poorest cities. From 1998 to 2002, he served as president of Citizens for Better Schools, a New Jersey–based nonprofit organization. He was a member of the New Jersey State Senate from 1994 to 1998. Prior to that, he served in the New Jersey General Assembly and held positions that included chief executive of the New Jersey Network, director of the Fund for New Jersey, a special assistant to New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, special assistant to the New Jersey commissioner of education, deputy director of the White House Task Force on the Cities, and director of program development for United Progress, Inc., the anti-poverty agency for Trenton, New Jersey. MacInnes is the author of Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race (A Twentieth Century Fund Book published by NYU Press, 1996), and “Kids Who Pick the Wrong Parents and Other Victims of Voucher Schemes” (A Twentieth Century Fund/Century Foundation white paper, 1999).

MacInnes has a B.A. from Occidental College and an M.P.A. from The Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, where he also served as a visiting senior fellow from1976 to1978 and again from 1998 to 1999. He has had numerous opinion pieces published in the Newark Star-Ledger, the Record of Hackensack, the Daily Record of Morris County, and the New Jersey section of the New York Times.