Research Areas

My leadership research spans the full pipeline of school governance and administration—from school boards to principals to assistant principals—examining how those who lead schools shape the conditions for teaching and learning. One strand focuses on school boards as governing bodies: my work examines how board members make sense of their roles and responsibilities (Willoughby, Lee, & Crawford-Rossi, 2025) and how they adapted to the turbulence of the pandemic (Crawford, Will

My policy research uses quasi-experimental methods and large-scale administrative data to evaluate whether federal and state education programs achieve their intended effects, with a particular focus on rural schools and the funding mechanisms that serve them. Much of this work centers on the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP), the federal government's primary vehicle for supporting small and rural districts. In related studies, I examine whether the Rural and Low-Inc

My research on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) students works to disaggregate a population too often treated as monolithic, surfacing disparities in achievement, opportunity, and experience that aggregate data obscure. A central contribution of this work is conceptual and empirical groundwork: in a systematic review of the literature, my colleagues and I interrogate the "model minority" framing and document how the field has—and has not—studied

This line of research examines the school and instructional factors that shape student achievement and long-term success, with particular attention to how advantages accumulate over a student's educational career. A central strand focuses on teacher quality, moving beyond single-year measures to ask how cumulative exposure to effective and highly qualified teachers shapes student outcomes over time. My work shows that sustained access to high-performing teachers has lasting e