Bio

David Woo is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Before starting his doctoral studies, he worked as a high school English teacher on Chicago’s south side for six years. While working as a teacher and grade level lead, he grew interested in the influence of school leadership and policy on educational outcomes for students of color and students from low-income families. To gain the theoretical foundations and quantitative research methods he would need to interrogate the ways that school leaders can support or hinder the learning of students from marginalized communities, he completed an M.Ed. in Instructional Leadership with a concentration in Education Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago before pursuing a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt. His research centers on understanding how education policy and research can prepare and support school leaders to be effective instructional leaders and organization managers. Some of his current research examines the impact of assistant principals on school culture, the relationship between prior work experiences on early career principal performance, and the factors that influence collective bargaining in the charter school context.

 

Most of David’s training and research experience in education policy analysis has employed quantitative research methods. Over the course of his training at Vanderbilt, he has been trained in econometric methods, causal inference, structural equation modeling, and item-response theory. He also has training and experience in survey design and qualitative research methods. His primary role as a research assistant has been in managing the data collection and analysis for an IES grant funded research project evaluating the reliability and validity of an assessment of instructional leadership capacity (PI: Jason Grissom). David’s research, including his dissertation, often uses large-scale administrative data sets accessed through the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a research practice partnership between the Tennessee Department of Education and Vanderbilt University. Although his strengths lie primarily in quantitative methods, he also has experience in qualitative research. He currently has an ongoing qualitative study aimed at understanding the contextual factors that impact collective bargaining in charter management organizations across two cities (funded by the Eugenia A. Kemble Research Grant).

 

For David, school leadership is an important policy lever for continuous school improvement and equitable outcomes in education. His experience as a teacher in an economically marginalized, predominantly African-American neighborhood in Chicago shapes and drives his research agenda. He has seen firsthand how effective leadership can lead to improved outcomes for students, and how ineffective leadership can impede the educational program of schools. His past research has earned the Emerging Scholar Award (2015) by AERA’s Law and Education SIG, and he is both a Jackson Scholar and a Clark Seminar Alumnus. He has published articles in Educational Administration Quarterly and Teachers College Record.