Ph.D. and M.S. in economics, Duke University; B.S. in policy analysis, Cornell University
Kata Mihaly is a senior economist and associate director of the Economics, Sociology and Statistics Department at the RAND Corporation. She is also a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research is focused on evaluations of education programs using rigorous methods, including randomized control trials, regression discontinuity, propensity score matching methods, and other quasi-experimental evaluation designs. She is particularly interested in the topic of teacher quality and the impact of programs designed to support teachers.
Mihaly has worked on developing statistical methods for combining multiple measures of teaching for the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She recently led a four-year randomized control trial study under RELSW examining the impact of providing a feedback checklist for principals to use with teachers following formal observations on teacher observation scores and student achievement. She is currently a Principal Investigator on an i3 grant to evaluate the impact of a teacher professional development program in Chicago, and a study evaluating the impact of Teach For All on school community and student education outcomes in Nigeria and India.
She has been invited to provide technical assistance on the issue of teacher and preparation program evaluation by a number of districts and states. She was certified in WWC standards (version 4.1) in December 2020.
Ashley Pierson, Jill Cannon, Rachel Perera, Kata Mihaly, Rebekah LeMahieu, Professional development incentives for Oregon’s early childhood education workforce: A randomized trial, Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest, 2021 (forthcoming)
Sy Doan, Kata Mihaly, and Daniel McCaffrey "Relationships between teaching practices and student outcomes," in , Global Teaching InSights: A video study of teaching, OECD Publishing, 2021
Sy Doan, Jonathan Schweig and Kata Mihaly , "The Consistency of Composite Ratings of Teacher Effectiveness: Evidence from New Mexico," American Educational Research Journal, 56(6), 2019
Kata Mihaly, Heather L. Schwartz, Isaac M. Opper, Geoffrey Grimm, Luis Rodriguez, and Louis T. Mariano , Impacts of a checklist on the feedback principals provide to teachers after observations, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest, 2017
Cory Koedel, Kata Mihaly, and Jonah E. Rockoff, "Value-Added Modeling: A Review," Economics of Education Review, 47(1), 2015
