Jason Grissom

Faculty Director, Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA)
Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education, Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations

Professor Grissom's research uses large data sets and draws on the perspectives of political science, public administration, and economics to study the governance of K-12 education, including both its leadership/management and political dimensions. He is particularly interested in identifying the impacts of school and district leaders on teacher and student outcomes and has conducted research on principal effectiveness, human capital decision-making in schools, school board governance, and turnover among teachers, principals, and superintendents. He has also published a stream of articles on the implications of the race and gender composition of the public education workforce and the public bureaucracy more generally for the distribution of resources and outcomes among diverse groups. His work has appeared in such outlets as American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Researcher, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Politics, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and Teachers College Record.

Grissom serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association, and as faculty director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a research-policy-practice partnership between Peabody and the Tennessee Department of Education that produces research to inform the state’s school improvement efforts. He is also a Chancellor Faculty Fellow (2018–2020) and PI of an IES-funded postdoctoral fellowship program on school leadership. Professor Grissom has current research projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. He holds a M.A. in Education Policy and a Ph.D. in Political Economics from Stanford University.

Media Mentions

Strong principals retain effective teachers—and don’t retain ineffective ones

Effective Principals Keep Good Teachers Not Low Performers

Former teachers' return to classroom feeds workforce, gender differences prevalent