Dr. Joanna Mathias is a Senior Research Associate with the Strategic Resource Allocation and Systems Planning Team at WestEd where her projects include analyses of early college and college promise programs, the effect of school finance reform in California on student achievement, and the equity impacts of fiscal autonomy for schools, as well as data analysis to support community college master planning. She is an experienced policy researcher with expertise in the economics of education, education policy, and econometrics, in particular, leveraging quasi-experimental econometric methods on large institutional and administrative data sets for causal inference.
She has previously worked in partnership with state and local education agencies, advocacy groups, and private funders to answer pressing questions on access to educational opportunities and the impacts of educational policy in various contexts. She has presented her work at the Association for Education and Finance Policy Annual Conference, and both the American and California Education Research Association Annual Conferences. She received the CERA 2021 Outstanding Paper Award for her work on access to dual enrollment. She has also published policy briefs and technical reports through UC Davis’ Wheelhouse and Stanford University’s Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).
As a first-generation college student and community college alumna, Dr. Mathias is broadly interested in the role of education in intergenerational social mobility, with an emphasis on postsecondary transitions. Her recent work has focused on the college & career readiness space, particularly on access and equity in career and technical education and dual enrollment, in addition to college & career readiness in accountability systems.
Dr. Mathias holds a Ph.D. in school organization & education policy from the University of California at Davis, and an MS in economics from North Carolina State University.