Jason Grissom

Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education Vanderbilt University

  • Nashville TN

An expert in K-12 leadership and policy and the impacts of school and district leaders on teacher and student outcomes.

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Vanderbilt University

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Biography

Jason A. Grissom is Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and faculty director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance. His research uses large-scale administrative and survey data—often coupled with data from interviews and observations—to study school and district leadership, educator mobility, and issues of educational equity. His work has appeared in such top outlets as the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Researcher, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Politics, and Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Dr. Grissom has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed articles on such topics as principal hiring, evaluation, preparation, diversity, supervision, and effectiveness. He is also an expert on the causes and consequences of turnover among superintendents, principals, and teachers. Dr. Grissom is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy. He holds a M.A. in Education Policy and a Ph.D. in Political Economics from Stanford University.

Areas of Expertise

Teacher effectiveness
School Boards
K-12 Administration
Education Policy and Leadership
Teacher Pay
Race and Gender of the Public Education Workforce
Governance of K-12 Education
Leadership Effectiveness
Leadership Principals
School and District Leaders
Teacher Mobility
Education Policy
Teacher Evaluations
Teacher Turnover

Accomplishments

Fellow

Chancellor Faculty

Chancellor’s Award for Research

On Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

A. Ross Thomas Outstanding Paper Award

Journal of Educational Administration

Education

Stanford University

Ph.D.

Stanford University

M.A.

North Carolina State University

B.A.

Affiliations

  • Faculty Fellow, Tennessee Education Research Alliance
  • Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Vanderbilt University
  • Thomas B. Fordham Institute/American Enterprise Institute Emerging Education Policy Scholar
  • Policy Research Scholar, University of Missouri Institute of Public Policy
  • American Educational Research Alliance

Selected Media Appearances

We Pay Superintendents Big Bucks and Expect Them to Succeed. But We Hardly Know Them

Education Week  online

2021-06-11

What could we learn if we did have year-to-year—sometimes called longitudinal—data on the same sample of superintendents? We have some clues on this, thanks to work by Jason Grissom, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, and his research colleagues who have looked at state-level data in Missouri and California.

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New Study Finds Gifted Programs Favor Wealth Over Ability

WPLN  radio

2019-10-10

A new study confirms that lower-income elementary students are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to be placed in gifted programs. That’s even when those students go to the same school and display the same levels of academic achievement.

Vanderbilt University's Jason Grissom co-authored the study. He says, while people often talk about a lack of access to gifted programs for low-income students, his research found something different.

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Unequal access to gifted-and-talented education is a national disgrace

New York Daily News  online

2019-10-09

Mayor de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group has proposed phasing out New York City’s elementary gifted programs. The group’s recommendation takes aim at school segregation, which it says is encouraged by unequal access to gifted programs for students from different backgrounds.

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Selected Articles

The Impacts of Principal Turnover

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Brendan Bartanen, Jason A Grissom, Laura K Rogers

2019

Nationally, 18% of principals turn over each year, yet research has not yet credibly established the effects of this turnover on student and teacher outcomes. Using statewide data from Missouri and Tennessee, we employ a difference-in-differences model with a matched comparison group to estimate arguably causal effects.

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Principal sorting and the distribution of principal quality

AERA Open

Jason A Grissom, Brendan Bartanen, Hajime Mitani

2019

Numerous studies document the inequitable distribution of teacher quality across schools. We focus instead on the distribution of principal quality, examining how multiple proxies for quality, including experience, teachers’ survey assessments of leaders, and rubric-based practice ratings assigned by principals’ supervisors, vary by measures of school advantage, using administrative data from Tennessee.

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Strategic retention: Principal effectiveness and teacher turnover in multiple-measure teacher evaluation systems

American Educational Research Journal

Jason A Grissom, Brendan Bartanen

2019

Studies link principal effectiveness to lower average rates of teacher turnover. However, principals need not target retention efforts equally to all teachers. Instead, strong principals may seek to strategically influence the composition of their school’s teaching force by retaining high performers and not retaining lower performers. We investigate such strategic retention behaviors with longitudinal data from Tennessee.

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