Brian Jacob PhD 2001

Brian Jacob wants to help improve education in the United States, and his research on such questions as the accuracy of high-stakes testing, teacher integrity, and the ability of principals to predict teacher quality is having a significant impact.

Jacob has been an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government since receiving his PhD in 2001. After college, he taught middle school math New York City's East Harlem community, which he says inspired his decision to enroll at the Harris School in 1996.

Teaching "solidified my interest in education," Jacob says. "At the same time, it made me more interested in going back to graduate school and studying education policy issues, doing things from more of a macro level."

His interest in systemic education issues led Jacob to his doctoral research on the pros and cons of highstakes testing-which connects a student's scores with whether he/she advances to the next grade or is eligible to graduate. He found that the accountability policy introduced by the Chicago Public Schools in the mid-1990s led to an increase in student achievement, reflected in higher test scores.

However, his research showed that students in Chicago improved significantly more on the city-administered tests relative to the Illinois state exam. "That suggested that teachers may have been teaching to the [high-stakes] test," he says, "which may make you worry that the great improvement you saw was not generalize-able."

Since arriving at Harvard, Jacob has taken that project a step further, examining evidence of teacher manipulation of test results. He has focused on students who showed unusually high gains on test scores during one year-and then sank back down the next year, sometimes by as much as two to three grade levels.

Jacob also noticed suspicious patterns, like "a bunch of kids who all answered the last 20 questions identically," he says, suggesting that systematic cheating of some sort took place. As a result of this research-and the widespread media attention it has garnered-districts are taking the initiative to explore the issue, Jacob adds.Those findings have made splashy headlines, but Jacob believes another line of research-on what makes an excellent teacher and how well principals identify those characteristics-might be his most influential thus far in impacting educators and policymakers.

In recent work, he found that principals were able to identify the very best and worst teachers in their schools, but had little ability to distinguish between those in the middle. One reason for this is that principals focus more on student outcomes than on improvement and tend to focus on the most recent experiences with the teacher-forgetting about particularly good or bad years a teacher has had in the past.

"My research up until this point has focused on trying to evaluate education policies and programs with the ultimate goal of improving educational systems for the most disadvantaged in our society," Jacob says. "In the future, I hope to be able to work more closely with specific states and school districts to help them use the insights from research to develop and evaluate new programs for at-risk children."

Ed Finkel