Welcome

This is the first post on a site I've been meaning to build for a long time.

Academic CVs are good at one thing — listing what someone has done — and bad at almost everything else. They flatten years of work into a column of citations, and they leave out the part I most want to share: why the work matters, who it's for, and what it adds up to.

So this blog is partly a workshop. I'm planning to use it to:

• Translate research into plain English. Most of what I publish goes behind a paywall and gets read by a few hundred people. The questions behind those papers — who gets ahead in the U.S. education system, and why — deserve a wider audience.
• Think out loud about policy. I spend a lot of time at the intersection of education research and state-level policy. I want to write about what that intersection actually looks like from the inside.
• Point to other people's work. A lot of the most interesting research in my field comes from collaborators, students, and adjacent disciplines. I'll link to what I'm reading and learning from.

If you've landed here from a paper, a talk, or a chance email — welcome. I'd love to hear what you're working on. You can reach me here.

— Matt