ABOUT US
Who We Are
Dr. John McKee, Chairman of the Board
Dr. John M. McKee is the founder and Executive Director of The Institute for
Social and Educational Research. Dr. McKee has dedicated his life's professional career to
researching the best way to make students successful. In his early professional career, Dr. McKee
served as the Executive Director of the Rehabilitation Research Foundation where he developed education
and rehabilitation programs for incarcerated public offenders at Draper Correctional Facility in Alabama.
Dr. McKee received his undergraduate degree from Emory University, with a major in psychology. He achieved his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee.
From 1953 to 1962, Dr. McKee was the Director Alabama's Community Mental Health Program. He expanded the state's mental health centers from three to ten and developed a school mental health program throughout the State.
In 1962, Dr. McKee conducted a demonstration project in education and rehabilitation at Draper Correctional Center, a prison for youthful adult offenders. So successful was the undertaking that through grants from the Ford Foundation and the Aaron Norman Fund through the project was expanded. Dr. McKee then resigned his position as the Director of Alabama Community Mental Health Program and took full direction of the prison experimental demonstration project. At this time, he received a three year grant from the National Institute for Mental Health. This grant was renewed for an additional three years, and the findings of his studies were disseminated on a broad scale nationwide.
During this period, Dr. McKee also received monies from the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Education for a Manpower Development and Training grant. Dr. McKee had earlier created a private, non-profit organization, the Rehabilitation Research Foundation, that became the recipient of all these grants and programs.
To this point, Dr. McKee’s major accomplishments were the following:
In 1972, Dr. McKee was appointed the professional monitor of the Federal Court order, insuring the "right to treatment" for hospitalized mental patients at Alabama's major mental facility, Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, AL. As the court appointed technical monitor, he devised an objective system for measuring the degree of compliance with the federal court order.
In 1973, Dr. McKee created a company called Pace Learning Systems, Inc. that was designed to further develop and market objective learning systems in basic education and occupational training. This company continued to expand and disseminate the many learning systems throughout the United States and Canada.
During the early 1990s, Dr. McKee, like many other responsible professional educators and psychologists, began addressing the challenges of the serious school dropout problems that practically every educational community confronts. Through his research activities, he discovered the major causes of dropout and then developed a programmatic strategy to effectively address the problems. From this endeavor, he created the Dropout Assessment and Prevention System (DAPS), which is being marketed by Pace Learning Systems, Inc. This research-based system is now undergoing testing and proving in Georgia and Alabama and may soon be adopted by other state dropout prevention programs.
Dr. McKee is author or co-author of over 40 publications. Most recently, Dr. McKee was honored by the American Correctional Education Association as the recipient of the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award.