Walker A. Swain

Walker A. Swain

Walker Swain is a doctoral candidate in Leadership and Policy Studies at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. His research examines the impacts of social policies on economically disadvantaged populations. Recent work has focused on the intersection of health policy and school policy, as well as teacher labor markets, early childhood education, school integration, housing, and choice. He also works collaboratively on quantitative evaluations of public health problems and their biological underpinnings.

He previously worked as a middle school teacher and basketball coach in Louisville, KY. He also worked as an education policy and program evaluation consultant, with an emphasis on outside of school learning opportunities for disadvantaged students. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill, an M.A. in Teaching from the University of Louisville, and a Master of Public Policy from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Currently, Walker serves as a graduate research assistant at the Tennessee Consortium on Research, Evaluation and Development (TNCRED). At TNCRED, he has worked with advisor Matthew Springer on providing timely, rigorous policy evaluation to the state department of education on several prominent initiatives, including statewide teacher evaluation systems, retention bonuses for high rated teachers in hard to staff schools, and a voluntary free public preschool program. He is working to develop links between state administrative data on school health services and student health metrics, to academic records, to better examine the vital intersection of health and education.