Sean Tanner is a Senior Research Associate at WestEd. Tanner is a multidisciplinary education researcher with expertise in the economics of education, education policy, and methods of causal inference. Tanner has conducted natural experimental research on large-scale education policies such as the Title I Schoolwide Program, California’s weighted-student funding formula and its district-level accountability system.
Tanner’s other projects include a methodological study of predictive performance in machine learning algorithms, an evaluation of the medium-term impacts of prekindergarten on academic achievement and social–emotional learning, and another study of the effects of local revenue on intra-district inequality.
Tanner received a PhD in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.