Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Ph.D.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an assistant professor in the Harris School.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an assistant professor in the Harris School, studies education policy, child health, and food consumption. Her most recent work investigates the impact of school accountability policies (like the Federal No Child Left Behind Act) and school reform policies (such as small schools and charter schools) on student performance and other outcomes. In addition, she has used the Project STAR experiment to study the impact of classroom composition and class size on student outcomes. In current projects, she is studying the impact of school policies such as school lunches and availability of recess and gym class on child obesity.

Her work on food stamps has measured how households alter their consumption of food and other goods when they receive food stamp benefits, and whether increased benefits improve the health of recipients.

Schanzenbach is a member of the University's Committee on Education, is affiliated with the Center on Human Potential and Public Policy and the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, and is a research consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. From 2002 to 2004, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in 1995 with a B.A. in economics and religion, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 2002 from Princeton University. She worked for the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1996 and 1997.

Selected Working Papers

"Left Behind By Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability" (with Derek Neal), Working Paper.
"The Introduction of the Food Stamp Program: Impacts on Food Consumption and Nutrition" (with Hilary Hoynes), NBER Working Paper.
"Selection Bias in College Admissions Test Scores" (with Melissa Clark and Jesse Rothstein), Working Paper.
"What Have Researchers Learned from Project STAR?" Harris School Working Paper #06.06.
"Does the Federal School Lunch Program Contribute to Childhood Obesity?" Harris School Working Paper #05.13.
"Classroom Gender Composition and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment," Working Paper.
"The Kindergarten Entry Age Arms Race: Age, Relative Age and Education Production" (with Elizabeth Cascio), Working Paper.