Sarah Cordes

Dr. Sarah Cordes's research and teaching interests are in the areas of education and urban policy, school finance, and applied quantitative methods. Drawing on frameworks across the disciplines of education, public policy, and economics, she uses large, administrative datasets from multiple national, state, and local agencies to explore complex issues around school choice, mobility, housing, and geography. Her work in these areas is united by an emphasis on understanding connections between where students live and where they go to school, how these connections shape educational inequities, and identifying policies to address disparate outcomes. Her current work focuses on the role of transportation in school choice, the effects of charter school expansion on traditional public school teacher turnover, the effects of racial home-ownership gaps on achievement gaps, and the effects of school choice on student mobility. Dr. Cordes’s work has been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the Russell Sage and William T. Grant Foundations, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Department of Education.