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Dan Goldhaber
Director, CALDER Center
Background
Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER, caldercenter.org) at the American Institutes for Research and the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR, cedr.us) at the University of Washington. Both CALDER and CEDR are focused on using state administrative data to do research that informs decisions about policy and practice.
Dan’s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, the broad array of human capital policies that influence the composition, distribution, and quality of teachers in the workforce, and connections between students’ K-12 experiences and postsecondary outcomes. Topics of published work in this area include studies of the stability of value-added measures of teachers, the effects of teacher qualifications and quality on student achievement, and the impact of teacher pay structure and licensure on the teacher labor market.
Dan’s research has been regularly published in leading peer-reviewed economic and education journals such as: American Economic Review, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Policy and Management, Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. The findings from these articles have been covered in more widely accessible media outlets such as National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and Education Week. Dan previously served as president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (2006-2017), an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997-2002, and as co-editor of Education Finance and Policy.
Publications
Dan Goldhaber
- The Lens
Mend, Don’t End, the Institution for Education Sciences
This piece originally appeared in The 74. Last week, DOGE’s “shock and awe” campaign came to education. The chaotic canceling of grants and contracts for various research activities at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), a little-known yet important agency rarely at the center of public debate, was unprecedented.
- Research Reports
Seniority Rules: Do Staffing Reforms Help Redistribute Teacher Quality and Reduce Teacher Turnover?
This paper finds that shifting from a seniority-based hiring system to a “mutual consent” hiring system leads to a short-term increase in turnover and inexperienced teachers, but after a few years the level of inexperienced teachers and turnover goes back to an uneven distribution across schools.
- Research Reports
Community College Transfer and Articulation Policies: Looking Beneath the Surface
This paper explores the relative importance of specific policy components on post-secondary outcomes, and how such policies impact students with different aspirations or economic and ethnic backgrounds.
- Research Reports
Returns to Skill and Teacher Wage Premiums: What Can We Learn By Comparing the Teacher and Private Sector Labor Markets?
This paper offers empirical evidence on the size of incentives that might be needed to make teaching a relatively more attractive occupation for people with technical skills or high academic aptitude.
- Research Reports
Is it Better to be Good or Lucky? Decentralized Teacher Selection in 10 Elementary Schools
This working paper presents results from a qualitative field study of school-based hiring—one of the more foundational ideas for reforming centralized and bureaucratic human resource management (HRM) systems.
- Research Reports
Community Colleges and Higher Education: How Do State Transfer and Articulation Policies Impact Student Pathways?
This paper reviews state cross-institutional policies designed to better integrate community colleges with four-year college and university system schools, and examines how patterns of college attendance, transfer, and degree earning vary across states with different policies.
- Research Reports
Are Public Schools Losing Their ‘Best’? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce
This paper examines attrition and mobility of early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools using teacher value-added measures.
- Research Reports
Teacher Labor Markets and the Perils of Using Hedonics to Estimate Compensating Differentials in the Public Sector
Policymakers and researchers alike have expressed concern about a teacher quality gap between schools with affluent student populations and the more disadvantaged ones.
- Research Reports
Seeing Success: The Impact of Implementing Model Practices on Student Outcomes
This working paper evaluates the effect of implementing one of three prominent Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models on student achievement and discipline outcomes, using a matched sample of Florida model and non-model schools.
