Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education and (by courtesy) Political Science, Vanderbilt University
Jason A. Grissom is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education and (by courtesy) Political Science at Vanderbilt University, where he directs the Masters in Public Policy (MPP) program. He is also the faculty director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a research partnership between Vanderbilt and the Tennessee Department of Education aimed at improving the state’s school improvement efforts by connecting research to policy and practice. Professor Grissom’s research uses large data sets and draws on the perspectives of political science, public administration, and economics to study the governance of K-12 education, including both its leadership/management and political dimensions. He is particularly interested in identifying the impacts of school and district leaders on teacher and student outcomes. He has ongoing research projects on principal effectiveness, measurement and evaluation of principal job performance, and how principals make human capital or talent management decisions in their schools. He also conducts research on mobility among educators, which has included numerous studies of turnover among teachers, principals, and superintendents. Additionally, with a variety of colleagues, Professor Grissom has published a stream of articles on the concept of bureaucratic representation that investigate how the race and gender composition of the K-12 public education workforce matters for the distribution of resources and outcomes among diverse groups. His work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. He co-edited the 2016 book Improving Teacher Evaluation Systems: Making the Most of Multiple Measures(Teachers College Press). He currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Educational Researcher.