Brendan Bartanen is Assistant Professor of Education in the department of Education Leadership, Foundations & Policy in the School of Education and Human Development and Assistant Professor of Public Policy by Courtesy in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Bartanen's research aims to increase our understanding of the labor market for principals and teachers. In particular, his work examines the intersections among educator turnover, measures of effectiveness, high-stakes evaluation systems, and educator diversity. He was awarded the 2019 New Scholar Award from the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (Division L). Bartanen is also a research affiliate of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA), a research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Education.

Bartanen's work has been published in leading journals across education, public policy, and economics, including the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, the Journal of Human Resources, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. His recently published work includes demonstrating the importance of principals for shaping the racial composition of a school's teaching staff, examining the validity and reliability of rubric-based observational evaluations of preservice teachers, and descriptively documenting rates of assistant principal mobility and their relationship with principal turnover. His current projects include race and gender biases in high-stakes teacher observations, the validity and reliability of principal value-added models, and the returns to principal experience.