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.

Illustration of two parents walking hand in hand with their child along a tree-lined path

Illustration by Storyset

Before children can benefit from high-quality programs, they have to get into them. In partnership with education agencies, I study the challenges families face in gaining access to schools and programs, and I develop and evaluate tools and system-level changes to address them. My Choice-in-Context model frames family decision-making within the structures of choice systems, showing how family, system, and context factors interact to produce inequities, rather than treating disparities as the result of family preferences alone. This model guides my dissertation, conducted with the New York City Public Schools Student Enrollment Office, which includes an early warning system that uses machine learning to identify families at risk of not enrolling in preschool. This is the focus of my future research agenda.