One of the country's leading experts on the economics of education and school finance, particularly in the area of primary and secondary education reform, will deliver the 25th annual Howard T. McMyler Lecture at 4 p.m. March 26 at Reinberger Chamber Hall in Severance Hall.

Caroline Minter-Hoxby, professor of economics at Harvard University and a Cleveland native, will discuss recent research on school reform during the McMyler lecture. The lecture is sponsored by the department of economics at the Weatherhead School of Management.

The three most important aspects of school reform are choice, accountability and improving the pool of teachers, according to Minter-Hoxby. In this lecture, she will offer a sweeping view of recent history in America's schools, showing how they stand among world schools and relative to America's past. She also will present evidence on which past reforms have and have not worked and then will move to the current wave of reforms, focusing especially on vouchers, charter schools, statewide accountability programs and teacher pay.

In addition to teaching in Harvard's economics department, Minter-Hoxby is program director of the Economics Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution's K-12 Educational Task Force; a fellow at the MacArthur Foundation's Inequality and Social Interactions Network; and a senior adviser at the Brown Center for Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

A graduate of Shaker Heights High School, Minter-Hoxby earned her doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. She also holds a master's of philosophy in economics from the University of Oxford-England and an A.B. degree summa cum laude in economics from Harvard University. She was a Rhodes Scholar from 1988-1990. Minter-Hoxby is the daughter of Steven A. Minter, president and executive director of The Cleveland Foundation, the nation's oldest and second largest community foundation.

The Howard T. McMyler Memorial Lecture is named for Howard McMyler, a 1906 summa cum laude graduate of Western Reserve University. McMyler dedicated his career to teaching economics and social studies in the Cleveland Public Schools and organized the Cleveland Teachers Association in 1917. He earned a national reputation among public school teachers by spearheading efforts that established the first teachers' salary schedule in 1920.

In 1976, his widow, Opal McMyler Martin, established the Howard T. McMyler Endowment Fund to provide for an annual monetary prize to an outstanding junior majoring in economics and to bring to campus each year a nationally known economist to lecture on a timely topic.