Awardee | Sarah Cohodes (Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy)
Doctoral Fellow Sarah Cohodes, who receives her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard this week and will soon join the faculty of Columbia University Teachers College, is the recipient (with three collaborators) of a William T. Grant Foundation grant of $447,671 to carry out a randomized intervention study to determine how to help low-income students make informed high school choices.
The study is motivated by the idea that while school choice can potentially offer avenues to improve outcomes for low-income students, students may lack adequate information to select high-performing schools and may not know how to improve their chances of admission to selective high schools. The study will test the impact of providing informational resources and decision support to middle school students in New York City, home to the nation's largest high school choice program.
Jennifer Jennings, a sociology professor at New York University, serves as Principal Investigator for the project. A multidisciplinary team of three participate as co-PI's: Sean Corcoran of NYU, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj of Seton Hall University, and Cohodes, who joins the faculty of Columbia University Teachers College in July as Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy.
The grant was one of seven new research awards announced last week by the William T. Grant Foundation, which focuses on issues affecting children and youth. In 2014 the Foundation designated "Reducing Inequality" as a priority area for its activities, with the aim of spurring research on policies and programs that can help mitigate the impact of inequality on children and youth in the U.S.