Lauren Sartain is an Affiliated Researcher at the UChicago Consortium. Her main research interests are in understanding policies and practices that urban schools can implement in order to improve the outcomes and lives of the students and adults in the public school system. To answer these kinds of policy-relevant research questions, she implements a variety of econometric and quasi-experimental research techniques with large-scale administrative data in order to hone in on the effects of various policies. Lauren has also worked at various research institutes like the Chapin Hall Center for Children and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She has published and presented on a wide range of topics, including teacher quality, school choice and school quality, and discipline reform. While Lauren believes it is critical to apply rigorous methods to answer important policy questions, strong research only goes so far. Being able to take key findings and communicate them in a way that is meaningful for families, practitioners, and policymakers is also essential and at the heart of the research-practice partnership model. Lauren's research at the UChicago Consortium gives her a unique vantage point from which to study real-world policy problems in an interdisciplinary way. When she's not being a researcher, Lauren spends a lot of time raising her kiddos, Josephine and Theodore, and their yellow dog, Pearl.
