Associate Director, RAND Education, Policy Researcher
RAND Corporation
Heather Schwartz is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, associate director of RAND Education, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She researches education and housing policies intended to reduce the negative effects of poverty on children and families. Her work falls in four policy areas intended to help close the income achievement gap: economically integrative housing and school programs, early childhood learning opportunities, school choice, and school accountability measures. She is interested in experimental and non-experimental methods to make causal inferences about the effects of public policies. Her methodological skills include benefit-cost analyses, quantitative analysis of large secondary data sets, survey design, and collecting focus group and interview data. Schwartz earned her Ph.D. in education policy from Columbia University.