Director, Economics, Sociology, and Statistics Department; Senior Economist; Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School
To schedule an interview, call (310) 451-6913 or email media@rand.org.
Kata Mihaly is director of the Economics, Sociology, and Statistics Department and a senior economist at RAND, and 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 study to evaluate the impact and implementation of a toolkit under REL West and a study evaluating the impact of Teach For All on school community and student education outcomes in Nigeria.
Kata Mihaly 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. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from Duke University.
Ph.D. and M.S. in economics, Duke University; B.S. in policy analysis, Cornell University
