Postdoctoral Fellowship in Quantitative Methods to Evaluate Early Learning Programs and Policies, 20
The Education Policy Initiative (EPI) seeks candidates interested in deepening their knowledge of rigorous, applied quantitative education policy research for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship.
EPI is composed of researchers interested in understanding and evaluating education policies at the local, state, and national level. This fellowship position will train the postdoctoral fellow to evaluate the causal effects of early learning policies and practices, emphasizing the use of state and district longitudinal data. Fellows should be interested in investigating topics relevant to ongoing early learning policy conversations, working with practitioners in the field as partners, and using rigorous evaluation methods in collaboration with scholars at EPI, UM, and from other highly respected institutions.
Fellows will receive close mentorship from professor Christina Weiland and will have the opportunity to learn from cross-disciplinary faculty such as Brian Jacob, Kevin Stange, Katherine Michelmore, and other EPI affiliate faculty. The fellow will also have the opportunity to work with Rebecca Unterman and William Corrin at MDRC. Moreover, the University of Michigan (UM) is home to a dynamic community of researchers, with ample opportunity for professional development—via participation in seminars and trainings, as well as through exposure to high-profile speakers.
The research that will be completed over the 2-year fellowship is part of an Institute of Education Sciences sponsored research project. This is part of longstanding Boston Early Childhood Research Practice Partnership. Together with Boston Public Schools (BPS), researchers from UM and MDRC are conducting a follow-up study of the impacts of the Boston Prekindergarten (Pre-K) Program into early adulthood, where they will follow four cohorts of children who applied to the Pre-K program between 2007 and 2010 into late elementary, middle school, high school, and early adulthood, through the 2022-2023 school year. Using administrative data, the team will estimate the impacts of Boston Pre-K in 4th -12th grade and through age 20 on students' school progress, school engagement, academic achievement, educational trajectory, and educational attainment. They will also describe students' experiences during the COVID-19 crisis and explore whether the timing of crisis held different implications for students in later high school grades versus middle school/early high school.
The postdoctoral fellow will participate in all aspects of the research process, including IRB administration, analysis, writing, and presentation. They will clean and analyze data; participate in research planning; write papers; present results at seminars and professional meetings; and help to supervise research assistants. Given the state and local context of the core project, fellows will have ample opportunity to learn how to develop research partnership with practitioners or public agencies and to communicate results to non technical audiences.
EPI strives to foster an inclusive work environment that is home to scholars with a wide range of backgrounds and research interests. We do so by bringing in a diverse set of speakers who do research directly on racial and socioeconomic inequality in education, encouraging trainings and collaborations across campus, surveying community members about our seminar culture, and self-evaluating ways to make our research— from start to finish—more equitable. We are interested in recruiting applicants with diverse backgrounds and life experiences and from a diverse pool of academic disciplines and PhD institutions. We welcome fellows
who will expand the types of research questions asked by our current community, including questions at the intersection of education policy and social equity, racial inequality and racism, and gender inequality.
The postdoctoral fellowship is supported by grant R305A220036 from the United States Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences. It is a 2-year fellowship beginning in the summer of 2023 with competitive salary and benefits plus funds for related travel.
Application Process and Deadline
We will accept applications submitted online. Please visit our website for instructions. Complete applications include a 2-3 page statement of interest, writing sample (job market paper or recent publication authored / co-authored by the applicant), CV, and the names of three references (we will contact finalists for letters of
recommendations). We will begin reviewing applications on December 15, 2022 and the final deadline for submitting an application is January 1st. We anticipate starting screening interviews the second week of January.
Learn more here: https://edpolicy.umich.edu/training/postdoctoral-fellowship
