Teaching

  • Education Politics: Power and Inequality in K12 Education Systems

    • University of Pittsburgh; Spring 2023

    • This course examines the political systems that maintain inequality in U.S. primary and secondary schools including the creation of rights, agenda setting, and policy solutions. The course also examines the ways in way various policy solutions that are intended to mitigate inequality have succeed and failed (e.g., school finance reform, standards-based reform, “desegregation”). Finally, we study the politics of inequality in the context of primary and secondary schools.

  • Research Methods

    • University of Pittsburgh; Fall 2022

    • This course is designed to introduce you to the basic concepts and specialized terminology of research methodology and to the important features of a variety of research approaches. The primary goal of this course is to help you become an intelligent consumer of research. The lectures, readings, discussions, and exercises are all intended to help you develop an understanding of the interrelated roles of research design, measurement, and statistics in the research process and to make you aware of the methodological decisions researchers must make.

  • Causal Inference

    • University of Pittsburgh; Fall 2022

    • In this course, we will focus on framing research questions with a causal lens and on research designs and analytic techniques that provide the tools for answering these key questions in a causal framework. Specifically, we will learn about research designs for drawing causal inferences, including randomized trials, regression discontinuity, differences-in-differences, instrumental variables, and propensity score and other matching techniques.

  • Data Management

    • Annenberg Center for Education Reform; Co-Director and Faculty; Summer, 2021

    • Course designed to provided undergraduate students with the programing skills required to clean data for education research.

  • Public Policy

    • Vanderbilt University; HOD 2700; Fall, 2018 & Spring, 2020

    • This course is as an exploration of the foundations of public policy, the policy process and the factors that influence policymaking at the national, state, and local levels. The course provides an in depth understanding of the core concepts in public policymaking. For this reason the course is structure around the steps of the policymaking process. This approach is analytically useful but has several notable flaws that we will explore. The second goal is to equip students with the tools to consume information about public policy (e.g., news, research) in scholarly manner.