Shi’s education research funded by Russell Sage and Gates Foundations
Ying Shi, assistant professor of public
administration and international affairs, recently won a $29,809 grant jointly
funded by the Russell Sage and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations for her
upcoming research related to educational inequality and opportunity. John
Singleton, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester,
will also be an investigator on this project.
Shi’s project, titled “Examining
Underrepresented Students’ Access to and Gains from Selective Public High
School Education,” will focus on whether increased access to selective public
high schools is effective at improving student outcomes and increasing their
upward mobility. Shi and Singleton will work closely with a selective public
high school, linking student applicant data with statewide records, allowing
them to assess long-term student outcomes, including college completion. They
also will study what factors contribute to demographic underrepresentation in
selective public high schools.
The Russell Sage Foundation, founded in 1907,
works to improve methods, data, and theoretical dimensions of the social
sciences, funding research projects on a wide range of social science topics.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which began in 1997, works to develop
new ideas to address issues of extreme poverty and poor health in developing
countries, as well as the failures of the U.S. education system; the foundation
has distributed more than $50 billion in grants for research in 138 countries.
Shi, who is also a senior associate at the
Center for Policy Research, studies educational inequality and the economics of
race. Her research has been published in Economics
of Education Review and the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. She is currently working
on projects investigating teacher racial bias, the impact of diversity in local
government, and the role of district leadership in public education. After
receiving a PhD from Duke University in 2017, Shi spent two years as a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University.
You can find more information about Shi’s project in
this grant announcement from the Russell Sage Foundation.
03/13/20