Wayne Sandholtz

Research Focus

A wealth of recent evidence, including much of my own, sheds light on how to improve student learning. However, the adoption of these evidence-based practices is subject to the discretion of policymakers, leaving millions of children’s learning subject to political and bureaucratic uncertainties. My proposed project aims to gather evidence on policymakers’ political incentives to adopt evidence-based policy by measuring how improved learning affects electoral outcomes. To accomplish this, the project will leverage existing data from dozens of randomized controlled trials of learning interventions, for which good estimates exist of program effectiveness and the variability of program effectiveness. I will then combine these data on variation in educational policies with newly gathered electoral data, measuring whether voters near higher-learning schools reward the government at the ballot box for improving school quality. Connecting and harmonizing these disparate data sources will ultimately provide actionable evidence on how and when policymakers benefit from adopting policies that improve student learning. This is crucial for designing policies that can truly scale.