Allison Atteberry

Allison Atteberry conducts research on teacher- and school-level interventions designed to improve the quality of instruction experienced by historically underserved students. As a field, we are increasingly aware of how difficult it is to determine whether policies, practices, and interventions have the intended impacts, and so Atteberry approaches her work with a strong interest in what constitutes compelling evidence of causal effects in quantitative research.

In terms of methods, Atteberry teaches and uses both econometric and statistical approaches to education policy analysis. She has a particular interest in the estimation of education production functions in the context of value-added modeling, as well as randomized control trials, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, fixed effects, and difference-in-differences causal models. Atteberry also enjoys using hierarchical linear models given their unique suitability for asking sociological questions in nested settings (e.g., repeated observations nested within students, nested within schools, etc.).

Atteberry’s academic interests center on policies and interventions that are intended to help provide effective teachers to the students who need them most. This has led her to focus on the identification, selection, development, and retention of teachers who have measurable impacts on student achievement. Specific topics include teacher preparation, high quality professional development, mentoring and peer collaboration, efforts to use measures of effectiveness formatively to improve practice, policies that target district responses to teachers and schools based on measures of effectiveness, and incentives for the strongest teachers to work in hard-to-serve schools.

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2011
B.A., University of Chicago, 2005

Curriculum Vitae

• Teacher- and school-level interventions designed to improve the quality of instruction experienced by historically underserved students
• Policies and interventions that are intended to help provide effective teachers to the students who need them most
• Areas of specialization include teacher labor markets, education policy analysis, summer learning loss, production of social inequality, quantitative method and causal inference