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