Research

My research is motivated by a central question: how can we empower caregivers and create systems that make high-quality educational opportunities more equitable and accessible?

I study the full path of educational opportunity: first, how children get into schools and programs, and then how those systems can keep giving them high-quality opportunities once they are there. Along that path, I believe it is just as important to understand how policies and programs are put into practice, and how they can be made more effective, as it is to know whether they work. My work is interdisciplinary, draws on quantitative and qualitative methods, and is done in partnership with education agencies, such as those in the New York City Public Schools system and in other education systems around the world.

I am currently most interested in access to high-quality early childhood education.

Research Areas

Determinants of Educational Opportunity

How children’s homes, schools, and broader structural contexts shape their learning, development, and access to opportunity.

Strengthening Programs and Their Implementation

Whether education programs work, and the conditions under which they can be implemented well, improved, and scaled.

Access to Education

How families navigate choice and enrollment in education systems, and what systems can do to support them. My work has focused on access to early education programs.

Research Projects

Strengthening the Architecture for High-Quality Universal Pre-K

A research-practice partnership studying how New York City’s Pre-K for All system supports teachers and children’s school readiness.

Early Childhood Strings Program

An ongoing partnership to support the implementation and evaluation of a strings-based arts integration pilot in New York City pre-K through grade 2 classrooms.

See Publications for a full list of my work.