Dr. Elizabeth Farley-Ripple, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Education and Public Policy in the School of Education and an affiliate of the Institute for Public Administration at the University of Delaware. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Education Policy and has been working in educational research over ten years. In addition to serving as the Director of the Partnership for Public Education, she co-leads R4S funded by IES and a Spencer-funded project examining teachers’ use of data for instructional decision-making. She has expertise in quantitative and mixed methods and applies a variety of methodological tools to research projects, including in regression, multi-level models, social-network analysis, surveys, and content analysis. Her research expertise is in policy analysis and evidence-based decision-making, and recent work includes studies of administrator mobility, school and teachers’ use of data, teacher quality and effects, and equity in student outcomes.
Dr. Farley-Ripple has been awarded grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Institute for Education Sciences and has published research in respected journals such as Educational Researcher, Journal of Educational Administration, Educational Policy, the American Journal of Education, Educational Management, Administration, and Leadership, and Urban Education. Her recent co-authored article, “Rethinking Connections Between Research and Practice in Education: A Conceptual Framework,” was identified as the 8th most read education articles of 2018 by the American Educational Research Association. This work theorizes a new way of understanding the challenges of bridging the traditional gaps between research produced by universities or think-tanks and practice in schools and districts.