Daphna Bassok is professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia and associate director of EdPolicyWorks, a collaboration between the School of Education and Human Development and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Her research focuses on early childhood education policy and efforts to improve early childhood education at scale. She is particularly interested in policies aimed at supporting the early childhood education workforce.

Bassok directs the Study of Early Education through Partnerships (SEE-Partnerships), which works closely with early childhood policymakers at the Virginia and Louisiana departments of education to evaluate policies aimed at improving early childhood systems.

Currently, she is leading a multi-year evaluation of Virginia’s Federal Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five initiative, which aims to expand access to stable, affordable and quality early education for all Virginia children. As part of that evaluation, her team is leading the first-ever randomized controlled trial measuring how financial support for early childhood educators impacts turnover and attrition.

Through a long-standing research-policy partnership in Louisiana, Bassok and colleagues are studying state efforts to reduce early childhood teacher turnover including Louisiana’s novel approach to credentialing child care teachers, and the impacts of policies to increase teacher compensation.

Bassok’s work has been generously funded by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Spencer Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Foundation for Child Development.

She holds a Ph.D. in the economics of education, an M.A. in economics and an M.A. in policy analysis and evaluation, all from Stanford University.