USC EdPolicy Hub
USC EdPolicy Hub
he USC EdPolicy Hub collaborates with schools, education systems, and community colleges throughout Southern California to conduct rigorous, actionable, boundary-spanning research. Research results—shared with language and formats geared for practitioners and policymakers—inform decisions for educators, policymakers, and families, ultimately improving student outcomes.
For more information, read the USC EdPolicy Hub Summary.
Reports
Harmonizing Systems to Reduce Eviction and Homelessness
Rising housing costs are putting more families at risk of displacement, eviction, and homelessness, with serious consequences for students, schools, and educational equity. This new report underscores why preventing housing insecurity must be a priority for education leaders and policymakers committed to advancing equity, highlighting cross-sector strategies that bring schools and housing agencies together to stabilize families before they lose their homes.
Measuring Supply of and Demand for Expanded Learning Programs
In this pilot project, Hub researchers examine supply and demand for expanded learning (EL) afterschool programs in Lynwood, California and explore how well providers are meeting parents’ needs in one community.
Navigating Democracy in Divided Times
Offering insights from a multi-case study of 10 school board members serving in 2023–2024 within a variety of diverse school districts in California, Julie Marsh et al., examine how school board members are experiencing and negotiating rapidly changing political and social contexts.
The Price of Flexibility: Evaluating the True Cost of Distance Education
A new brief on the cost of distance education compared to in-person courses is now available from Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students (LTES) a collaboration between the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR), and the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.
Why USC?
The Hub is based at the USC Rossier School of Education as part of Dean Pedro Noguera’s Educational Equity Initiative. USC Rossier has an unparalleled network of graduates working as district leaders across Southern California. From our USC Rossier base, we will bring in expertise from across the university including the USC Price School of Public Policy, the Center for Applied Research in Education, and other research centers and researchers both within and beyond USC Rossier, ensuring that we can always match the appropriate expertise and methods to the problems at hand.
USC Rossier has an unparalleled network of graduates working as district leaders in Southern California and across the state with whom we are collaborating to drive this work. This includes more than 80 superintendents who are active in the Dean’s Superintendent Advisory Group.
Patricia Burch
Patricia Burch, is a professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and Co-Faculty Director of the USC EdPolicy Hub. She holds a Ph.D. in Education and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University. With over twenty-five years of experience, her research focuses on large-scale reforms aimed at improving equity in urban school systems, including after-school programs, teacher quality, shared leadership, and instructional improvement.
Dr. Burch employs mixed methods to examine the design, implementation, and impact of policies intended to expand access to high-quality instruction for students in urban public schools. Her work explores how educational institutions are influenced by broader social and economic dynamics, particularly within the context of education markets.
She is the author of five well-regarded books, including one on mixed methods research in program and policy evaluation, and has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Dr. Burch previously served as editor of the Journal of Education Policy and currently sits on the editorial board of AERA Open. Her commentaries on educational issues have appeared in national outlets such as The Hechinger Report, EdSource, Education Week, and The 74 Million.
Her areas of expertise include educational privatization, organizational and institutional theory, and comparative policy. A key conceptual contribution of her work is the theory of “hidden markets,” which explains how market forces are structurally embedded within public education. Rather than focusing solely on ideological privatization, her research reveals how privatization increasingly functions through the technical and contractual integration of private actors into the daily operations of schools. She conceptualizes this as a post-neoliberal shift—one that redefines governance, accountability, and equity not by eliminating the public sector, but by reshaping it through partnerships with commercial entities. This approach invites scholars and practitioners alike to critically examine the subtle ways market logics influence educational systems and opportunities.
Currently, Dr. Burch is engaged in several collaborative research projects that investigate the infrastructural interdependencies between markets and education across various policy domains, including artificial intelligence, out-of-school time, alternative education, and juvenile justice.
Jon Fullerton
Jon Fullerton, Hub Executive Director, is a Research Professor at USC Rossier. He has over twenty years’ experience in using data to guide system improvement and the effective use of financial resources in the education sector. Before coming to USC, Fullerton was the Executive Director of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University. While at CEPR, he founded the Strategic Data Project (SDP) which places and trains analytic data fellows across the PK12 and postsecondary sectors. Fullerton has also served as the Board of Education’s Director of Budget and Financial Policy for the Los Angeles Unified School District and was Vice-President of Strategy, Evaluation, Research, and Policy at the Los Angeles Education Partnership.
Soumya Mishra
Soumya Mishra, is a postdoctoral research associate with the IES-funded Leveraging Technology and Student Engagement (LTES) project. Soumya’s research interests include student access and success in American community colleges as well as higher education policy in South Asian countries. Her current work involves mixed methods research on institutional responses to instructional challenges created by Covid-19, differences in student outcomes between various instructional modalities, and cost analysis of instruction across modalities. Soumya holds a bachelors degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University. She earned a masters and PhD in Education Policy from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Morgan Polikoff
Morgan Polikoff, Hub Faculty co-Director, is a Professor of Education at USC Rossier. He studies curriculum, standards, accountability, and assessment policy and is the author of 2021’s Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform. He also investigates public opinion on education policy and families’ experiences in schools using state- and nationally-representative surveys, including USC’s Understanding America Study.
Anna Rosefsky Saavedra
Dr. Anna Rosefsky Saavedra, a Research Scientist and USC Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE) Co-Director, is an applied education researcher with specialization in the areas of teaching and learning and civics education. She is also the Director of Research for the USC EdPolicy Hub based at the USC Rossier School of Education. Dr. Saavedra co-leads the education module of the Understanding America Study (UAS), a nationally representative panel study of parents’ perceptions and reports on their children’s educational experiences. Between 2015-21, Dr. Saavedra was Principal Investigator (PI) of a five-district, mixed-methods, randomized controlled trial (RCT) efficacy study of the implementation and impact of a project-based learning approach to teaching AP U.S. Government and AP Environmental Science. Based on study results, the College Board is changing Advance Placement courses and corresponding exams to make them more project-based. Dr. Saavedra is currently the PI of a five-year RCT efficacy study of a program designed to help teachers facilitate classroom discussions of contested topics, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences (IES). She is also co-PI of another IES-funded RCT, and leads several other projects related to applied learning. Prior to her research career, Dr. Saavedra managed educational programs and partnerships for an educational travel company and taught high school world history. She earned her education master’s and doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Eric Larsen
Eric Larsen is a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California Education Policy Hub, specializing in teacher and leader effectiveness, program and policy evaluation, and experimental and quasi-experimental research designs. He is currently the Co-PI for the Education-to-Workforce K–12 Network, which centers on a new network of Southern California districts and charter management organizations that harness administrative and other data to develop strategies aimed at improving academic and workforce outcomes for students. Dr. Larsen has been the PI of seven evaluations of interventions designed to improve the effectiveness and retention of K–12 school leaders. In 2023 and 2024, he was the PI of a study for Illinois State Board of Education that gathered feedback on the state’s teacher and leader evaluation systems and structures from stakeholders statewide and reviewed best practices from other states. Between 2017 and 2022, he led a project that generated annual teacher and school value-added scores for Florida Department of Education for Grades 4–8 ELA and mathematics and the Algebra I End of Course assessment. Dr. Larsen was a middle school teacher in California public schools for eight years, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Davis.
Marshall Garland
Research Scientist and Co-Director of the USC Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE)
Huriya Jabbar
USC Rossier Associate Professor of Education.
Royel Johnson
USC Rossier Associate Professor of Education
Julie Marsh
USC Rossier Professor of Education and Co-director of the Center on Education Policy, Equity and Governance (CEPEG)
Pedro A. Noguera
Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education
Amie Rapaport
Research Scientist and Co-Director of the USC Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE)
Dan Silver
Research Scientist at the USC Center for Applied Research in Education
Jun Byon
USC Rossier School of Education
Alvin Makori
USC Rossier School of Education
Jeimee Estrada Miller
USC Price School of Public Policy
Jake Scollan Rowley
USC Rossier School of Education
Shelby Smith
USC Rossier School of Education
Contact Us
For more information, email us at edpolhub@usc.edu.
The USC Rossier Center on Education Policy, Equity and Governance (CEPEG) is joining the USC EdPolicy Hub.
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