Allison Atteberry is an associate professor of education and public policy and director of EdPolicyWorks, a collaboration between the School of Education and Human Development and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA. She received her PhD in 2011 from the Stanford School of Education in educational policy analysis, with a minor in statistics. Atteberry conducts research on teacher- and school-level interventions designed to improve the quality of instruction experienced by historically underserved students.

Faced with the difficulty of determining whether policies, practices, and interventions have the intended impacts, Atteberry approaches her work with a strong interest in what constitutes compelling evidence of causal effects in quantitative research. Atteberry teaches and uses both econometric and statistical approaches to education policy analysis. She has a particular interest in the estimation of education production functions in the context of value-added modeling, as well as randomized control trials, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, fixed effects, and difference-in-differences causal models. Atteberry also enjoys using hierarchical linear models given their unique suitability for asking sociological questions in nested settings (e.g., repeated observations nested within students, nested within schools, etc.).

Atteberry’s academic interests center on policies and interventions that are intended to help provide effective teachers to the students who need them most. This has led her to focus on the identification, selection, development, and retention of teachers who have measurable impacts on student achievement. Specific topics include teacher preparation, high quality professional development, mentoring and peer collaboration, efforts to use measures of effectiveness formatively to improve practice, policies that target district responses to teachers and schools based on measures of effectiveness, and incentives for the strongest teachers to work in hard-to-serve schools.