Education Policy and Analysis
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If you have program-specific questions, please contact Assistant Director for Education Policy and Analysis Sarah Haas .
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Gain the skills to design, evaluate, and scale the effective policies and practices critical to improving outcomes for learners — at the global, national, state, and local levels.
The Education Policy and Analysis (EPA) Program will prepare you to lead and engage in education policy development, analysis, and change in organizations and settings throughout the United States and internationally. You also will learn how to scale effective education practices and how to leverage policy in order to expand their reach. The program will provide you with the theoretical frameworks and analytic methods that will enable you to design, implement, and evaluate policies at the global, national, state, institutional, program, and project levels. Our program prepares you to work in local, state, national, and international sectors, as well as research and consulting organizations, think tanks, institutions of higher education, and policy advocacy organizations.
"Crafting and evaluating education policy remains a critical part of ensuring better outcomes for all students, and our program leads the way in cultivating the next generation of education policy professionals. From integrating research and practice to improve public policy to identifying the best method of communicating research finding to policymakers, our program will provide you with the real-world tools you need to make a difference." Carrie Conaway Faculty Co-Chair
After completing the Education Policy and Analysis Program, you will have a deeper understanding of the following competencies that explore how to:
- Integrate values and goals - Integrate the values and goals of your organization or community throughout the policy process, with special attention to equity as a central value in education.
- Understand the issue and context - Define the educational problem or opportunity with an understanding of the relevant historical, social, economic, and political context, including the differing interests and incentives of stakeholders.
- Evaluate evidence and tradeoffs - Define policy options and the criteria for evaluating them. Evaluate the quality of the available evidence and use it to compare alternatives, considering fiscal, political, social, individual, and collective consequences and tradeoffs.
- Communicate and collaborate - Communicate, collaborate, advocate, and negotiate with allies, opponents, and other stakeholders. Convey evidence and reasoning clearly and appropriately for the audience.
- Engage in the policy process - Make recommendations and implement policy under conditions of uncertainty, revising decisions as new evidence and understandings come to light. Build and share new evidence on policy implementation and impact.
Curriculum Information
The EPA Program is designed to help you gain the knowledge and practice the skills essential to developing, implementing, and analyzing education policy in a wide variety of professional contexts. A minimum of 42 credits are required to graduate with an Ed.M. degree from HGSE.
The main elements of the 2024–25 academic year are:
- This program commences with How People Learn, an immersive online course that runs June–July and requires a time commitment of 12-15 hours per week.
- You will continue Foundations with Leading Change, Evidence, and Equity and Opportunity on campus in August.
- Your Equity and Opportunity Foundations experience culminates in an elected course, which will take place during terms when electives are available.
To fulfill the program requirement, students must take a minimum of 12 credits specific to EPA, including the following:
- The EPA Program Core Experience (4 credits) is a 4-unit fall semester course that introduces both practical competencies and theoretical frameworks about the policymaking process. You will survey policies across the sector and advance your learning through cases, problems of practice, and current policy debates. The experience offers exposure to a variety of education levels — early childhood, K–12, higher education, and adult learners — and settings in the U.S. and around the world. Students must enroll in their first fall semester.
- Research methods courses (4 credits), course topics may include statistics for educational research, qualitative research methods, and program evaluation.
- Policy-related courses (4 credits), course topics may include international comparative education policy, education finance, state and federal education policy, higher education student success, and additional research methods.
- Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE), a written submission that demonstrates application of program competencies to a real-world or simulated organization or client. The PAE may be a final project developed in a course, including the courses above, or in a field experience or internship. The purpose of the PAE is to allow you to practice, demonstrate, and reflect on the five core competencies of the EPA program.
- The remaining credits are taken via elective coursework , which includes the opportunity to specialize in a Concentration .
Explore our course catalog . Note, a ll information and courses are subject to change.
Program Faculty
Students will work closely with faculty associated with their area of study, but students can also work with and take courses with faculty throughout HGSE and Harvard. View our faculty directory for a full list of HGSE faculty.
Faculty Co-Chairs
Carrie Conaway
Carrie Conaway is an expert on strategic planning in education, data and resource use, evidence-based decision making, and connections between research and practice.
Andrew Ho is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice.
Peter Q. Blair
Emmerich Davies
Sarah Dryden-Peterson
Elizabeth Dawes Duraisingh
Susan Dynarski
Hadas Eidelman
Jarvis R. Givens
Thomas Kane
James S. Kim
Jaein Josefina Lee
Irene Anastasia Liefshitz
Joseph McIntyre
Luke W. Miratrix
Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez
Gabrielle Oliveira
Fernando Reimers
Paul Reville
Laura A. Schifter
Eric Taylor
Emiliana Vegas
Martin West
Career Pathways
The EPA Program prepares you for a variety of career pathways, including:
- Policy analyst
- Policy associate
- Local, state, or federal government professional
- Research associate or director of research
- Senior research portfolio manager
- Institutional research analyst
- Data analyst
- Program/project coordinator
- Program/project manager
- Community organizer
- Policy consultant
Cohort & Community
As an EPA student, you will be joining a community bound by a shared passion for improving education outcomes, opportunities, and systems through policy. The EPA cohort is comprised of learners from diverse professional backgrounds and levels of experience; from P–16 educators and leaders to policymakers and business executives; from the U.S. and diverse countries abroad; and from early childhood through postsecondary and adult education. Our community engages in shared learning inside and outside the classroom, including informal policy debates with faculty during brown bag lunches, panels with senior policy analysts who share advice on career pathways, and cohort-wide opportunities to learn about and from your peers.
Introduce Yourself
Tell us about yourself so that we can tailor our communication to best fit your interests and provide you with relevant information about our programs, events, and other opportunities to connect with us.
Program Highlights
Explore examples of the Education Policy and Analysis experience and the impact its community is making on the field:
Commitment to Community
Anthony Otadoy Garciano and Srishti Gulati will be honored with the Intellectual Contribution Award for the Education Policy and Analysis Program
HGSE Honors Master's Students with Intellectual Contribution Award
COMMENTS
Introduction. The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (the Evidence Act) and subsequent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) require agencies to establish and implement an agency-wide policy governing the design and conduct of evaluations.1,2 At the Department of Education (ED), evaluations include, but ...
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA) publishes rigorous, policy-relevant research of interest to those engaged in educational policy analysis, evaluation, and decision making. EEPA is a multidisciplinary journal, and editors consider original research from multiple disciplines, theoretical orientations, and methodologies.
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. is an established international peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers and reports on all aspects of assessment and evaluation within higher education. Its purpose is to advance understanding of assessment and evaluation practices and processes, particularly the contribution that these make to ...
Policy Reviews in Higher Education aims to influence and challenge policymaking in higher education by publishing high-quality original research and analysis which explores the implications of findings for the development and implementation of policy. We ask authors to include a full evaluation of the implications and the implementation of ...
Gain the skills to design, evaluate, and scale the effective policies and practices critical to improving outcomes for learners — at the global, national, state, and local levels. The Education Policy and Analysis (EPA) Program will prepare you to lead and engage in education policy development, analysis, and change in organizations and ...
The root val is Latin for worth, health, and strength, and evaluation refers to the assignment, negotiation, and maintenance of value in social life (Beckert and Musselin 2013; Lamont 2012).Although val shows up in higher education discourse about values (e.g., Nash 2019) and validation theory (e.g., Rendón 1994), and there is a long history of research on decision making by higher education ...
In higher education as well as other fields, policy outcomes have been the subject of evaluations, called outcome evaluations or impact evaluation/assessments in the literature (Rossi et al. 2004). Evaluations of such things as the impact university professors have on students during their studies have been done informally from medieval times ...
The Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) has also initiated a series of in-stitutional level quality assessment schemes to assure and enhance the quality of higher education. For example, the Quality Evaluation of Undergraduate Program scheme is one of most important schemes conducted by MOE since 2002.
ISSN: 1740-3863 (electronic) Journal no.: 41307. Associated with: Higher Education Policy is an international, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on issues of significance in higher education policy. The journal publishes original analyses, whether theoretical, empirical or practice-based. The range of coverage extends from case studies of ...
China's Higher Education Association commissioned a further project to develop an evaluation system for DWC uni-versities and colleges. These policy, institutional and research developments framed a conference held in July 2018 at Tsinghua University. The conference was titled "Construct-ing Higher Education Evaluation Systems for the ...
This program, set to end in summer 2022, was established to increase access to dual enrollment and subsequent college attendance for students of low-income families. In a recent article published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), we show that this program not only failed to increase low-income students' access to dual ...
The first five volumes of Policy Reviews in Higher Education. Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRiHE) was launched in 2017, and was the first new journal published by the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) for more than 40 years. The journal aims to open up a space for publishing in-depth accounts of significant areas of policy development affecting higher education ...
In higher education, change can be said to be the new constant, where various kinds of government-initiated reform and modernization attempts are sweeping through the sector around the globe (Maassen and Stensaker 2011).Given this profound interest in reform and change in and of the sector, it is a paradox that the most well-known work using an explicit policy implementation approach in higher ...
Aims and scope Higher Education Evaluation and Development (HEED) is a scholarly refereed journal that aims to encourage research in higher education evaluation and development, raising standard of evaluation research and sharing the discoveries worldwide.HEED is receptive to critical, phenomenological as well as positivistic studies.. The journal would like to publish more studies that use ...
Evaluation of teaching in higher education was appraised, identifying the status quo versus an alternative model for evaluation of teaching and instruction using the Bardach and Patashnik's (2019) eight steps of policy analysis (Table 1). Heterogeneous characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and other social ...
Academic evaluation is a social process taking place in different arenas in which values, worths, virtues, or meanings are produced, diffused, assessed, legitimated, or institutionalized with respect to academic products and their producers.
Examples of monitoring the effects of higher education policy instruments on universities' performance come primarily from the UK and Australia. Not coincidentally, these quality assurance mechanisms are based on performance metrics, which makes observing effects relatively easy as data collection is part of the instrument itself ...
How Big Are Effect Sizes in International Education Studies? David K. Evans. Fei Yuan. Preview abstract. Open Access Research article First published April 4, 2022 pp. 532-540. xml PDF / EPUB. Table of contents for Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 44, 3, Sep 01, 2022.
The Institute for Education Policy Research and Evaluation (IEPRE) at the University of Houston's College of Education is a group of scholars and educational decision makers focused on improving P-20 education. IEPRE engages in evaluation of P-20 educational policy initiatives and translates ...
The Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management is an international journal of professional experience and ideas in higher education. It is a must read for those seeking to influence higher educational policy making. The journal also aims to be of use to managers and senior academic staff who seek to place their work and interests in a broad context and influence educational policy and ...
30Higher Education Policy Vol. 3, No. 4, ¡990. Policy making and Evaluation in Higher Education. Maurice Kogan. INTRODUCTION. The links between evaluation and policy making are not well addressed in the literature, although projects financed in a recent. British ESRC initiative might soon yield interesting insights.
The Higher Education Policy Team carries out analysis on a wide range of higher education systems and policies.Its work is advised by the Group of National Experts on Higher Education (GNE-HE), which assists the Education Policy Committee (EDPC) in guiding the OECD's work on higher education policy.GNE-HE Delegates, nominated by countries, are experts in higher education policy from public ...
This thematic issue of Policy and Society focuses on the increased multifaceted characteristic of contemporary public policy (Peters, Citation 2015).Using the case of higher education policies from around the world, we highlight the multi-level, multi-actor and multi-issue - 'multi-s' - nature of public policy in areas of growing international and political attention.