Laura Davis is a Senior Research Scientist at the UChicago Consortium. Laura’s research centers broadly on the production of inequality in education, targeting intersections between teacher practice and the schooling experiences of young people from marginalized and historically underserved communities. As part of larger study of learning acceleration and pandemic recovery efforts in Chicago Public Schools, Laura’s current work explores practitioners’ experiences with the district's recently-launched Skyline curriculum in early literacy instruction. She recently led a qualitative study examining high school students’ trajectories into early college coursework to understand factors related to their decision making and post-secondary plans. Other projects have investigated the use of organizational climate data in school improvement and programmatic innovation in competency based education. Before joining the UChicago Consortium, Laura served as the Assistant Director of New York University’s Center for Research on Higher Education Outcomes, where she oversaw research and evaluation on teacher education and managed a portfolio of externally funded projects, including a longitudinal study of the career development trajectories of college students from structurally-disadvantaged backgrounds. Laura worked as an elementary classroom teacher in Los Angeles and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy and social foundations of education.
