Funding High-Poverty School Districts: Federal Policy Tools and the Limits of Incentives

Nora Gordon (Georgetown University) presented "Funding High-Poverty School Districts: Federal Policy Tools and the Limits of Incentives" at the annual Jerry Miner Lecture.

Nora Gordon is an economist and professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. She is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, non-resident fellow of the Urban Institute, and a member of the FutureEd Advisory Board.

Dr. Gordon and Carrie Conaway are the authors of "Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leader's Guide to Using Data and Research." Her own research focuses on American education policy, with an emphasis on the federal role in elementary and secondary education.

She has studied the distributional impacts of Title I; fiscal rules governing federal education grants; the Community Eligibility Provision; state school finance reforms, causes and consequences of school desegregation; and school district consolidation.

Her research has been published in journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation for Education Research, the American Educational Research Association, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Her popular writing appears in outlets including the New York Times, Education Week, and TheAtlantic.com.

Dr. Gordon has testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. She has served on the Institute of Education Sciences expert panel on the study of the Title I Formula and D.C.’s state Title I Committee of Practitioners, and currently serves on the professional advisory board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

Dr. Gordon enjoys mentoring junior scholars, including at the McCourt School, through the CeMENT program of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, and through the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education’s postdoctoral fellowship program.