Vanderbilt researchers are among those from 10 institutions to benefit from $6.5 million in funding by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to train and develop education scientists.
The grants are from the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). Vanderbilt researchers were funded specifically under the Postdoctoral Research Training Program in the Education Sciences.
Jason Grissom, associate professor of policy and education at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, received $673,426 to train postdoctoral researchers to study school leadership. The title of the award is “Postdoctoral Training Program in Research on School Leader Effectiveness and Career Pathways.”
Co-principal investigators on the study are Ellen Goldring, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Education Policy and Leadership and chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations; and Gary Henry, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education.
Grissom, Goldring and Henry are recruiting four postdoctoral students for two years each over the next three years to train them to conduct quantitative and mixed-methods research on school leader effectiveness and mobility (recruitment, retention, sorting across schools). All three faculty run large-scale, grant-funded research projects on school leadership in Tennessee, North Carolina and other sites around the country.
“We are thrilled by this opportunity to train a new generation of researchers to conduct rigorous studies on school leadership,” Grissom said. “Good principals and assistant principals often are the key to a school’s success, but we need to know a lot more about what makes them effective and how to get them into the schools that need them most.
“There really is no better place to study this topic than Peabody,” he said.
U.S. News and World Report ranked Peabody’s programs in education administration and supervision No. 1 in the magazine’s 2017 Best Graduate Schools rankings.
The Institute of Education Sciences is the independent research, evaluation and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The institute is fully funding the cost of the training program.