BRIAN JACOB, University of Michigan
I am honored to be a candidate for the APPAM Policy Council. I am a regular participant and presenter at the APPAM Fall Research Conferences, and invariably find the meetings to be one of the most engaging and energizing events of the year. I am currently the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and Professor of Economics at the Ford School of Public Policy. I am also serving as the director of the Center on Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan, a research center whose mission is to foster high-quality policy research and facilitate communication between academic researchers, practitioners and policymakers. My work focuses largely on K-12 education policy, although I have also done research in areas such as housing and criminal justice. Current projects include an exploration of non-traditional predictors of teacher effectiveness, a study of how employment protection affects teacher productivity, an analysis of school-based accountability on student achievement, research on the impact of gun shows on gun-related homicides and suicides and the impact of rent-based housing assistance on a variety of child and adult outcomes. I received my BA from Harvard College in 1992 and my Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago in 2001. Between college and graduate school, I worked as a policy analyst in the New York City Mayor’s Office and then as a middle school teacher in East Harlem.