Thomas Dee

About

Thomas S. Dee is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Dee is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a research associate for the programs on education, children, and health at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dee’s research focuses largely on the use of quantitative methods to inform contemporary issues of public policy and practice. Examples include studies of federal school-accountability policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act and research on the relationship between schooling and adult civic engagement. He has also published research on the effects of teacher-evaluation reforms in the District of Columbia Public Schools and on new accountability policies focused on early-childhood care centers. His current research includes studies of the design and impact of school curricula and of the causes and consequences of public-school disenrollment and chronic absenteeism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2024, he received the Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Peter H. Rossi Award for Contributions to the Theory or Practice of Program Evaluation from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). APPAM also awarded his collaborative research the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award in 2015 and 2019.

Dee currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Education Finance and Policy, and as an associate editor of Economic Inquiry.