Education Policy

Education research and public administration run on incompatible clocks. The first takes years to answer carefully; the second has to decide next quarter. A good share of bad policy comes from that mismatch rather than from bad faith or missing data.

My research dealt with inequality at the start of schooling: school segregation, the effect of social composition on learning, pandemic learning loss. What I learned there informs what I write here — about indicators that fail at the front line, assessments that measure what is easy to measure, and the difference between a policy that has been evaluated and one that is merely defended.