Feature

Student Spotlight: Lauren Sartain

After her two years at the Harris School, Lauren Sartain, MPP'08 is now a few blocks away at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an organization that studies Chicago school reforms.

Her new job may be due (at least in small part) to her honors thesis examining the different factors that affect high school graduation. She presented her thesis findings twice-once at the Harris School to faculty and students and once to the Consortium. A few days later, she was offered a job as a research analyst.

Sartain's thesis question developed in a class with Professor Dan Black on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). "The whole assignment for the class was to pick a research question you could answer in 10 weeks with the NLSY [data], and 10 weeks wasn't enough for me," she explained.

After analyzing data from the 1997 NLSY cohort, Sartain determined that a variety of factors-including race and ethnicity, family poverty status, suspensions, grade retention, and perceptions of school quality-all affect the likelihood of a student graduating from high school. While she stressed the need for more research to fully understand the determinants of whether a student graduates from high school, she cited two areas where policy work can have an influence-improving teacher quality, as teachers are key to student learning, and understanding the long-term implications of suspension and grade retention on students.

Even though Sartain's policy interests lie in education, particularly teacher and school quality, she explained, "I was less interested in the topic and more in the process-the process of using a big data set and really diving into it."

She also realized at the beginning of her second year that she wants eventually to pursue a PhD, and a written thesis under her belt will help in the process. Ironically, Sartain initially thought she would be finished with school once she received her master's degree. But by the start of her second year Sartain had changed her tune in part due to the many statistics classes on her schedule.

"I wanted an MPP because I thought I was a policy person, but I know now I'm more of a research person," she said. "I think as a policy school, the Harris School is the best place for a person who is really interested in the research side of policy."

Sartain decided to attend the Harris School partly because of her interest in public schools and education. "There's a lot of reform going on in Chicago schools, but there's also a lot of challenges as well," she said. "So if I'm really going to make an impact on public schools, then Chicago's a really great place to be."

And in her new job, Sartain will be doing just that. Over the next two years, she will be studying a new teacher evaluation system that will be piloted in Chicago Public Schools. "I'll be looking at the teacher evaluation system and that's well aligned with my interests."