Jason Grissom

Jason A. Grissom is Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and (by courtesy) of Political Science at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. He also serves as Faculty Director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a research-policy-practice partnership that produces research to inform Tennessee’s school improvement efforts.

An interdisciplinary scholar, Professor Grissom’s work applies perspectives from political science, public administration, and economics to the study of school and district leadership, educator mobility, educational equity, and the intersections among the three. His research typically makes use of large-scale administrative and survey data—often supplemented with data from interviews and observations—to answer questions in these areas. He has ongoing research projects on the impacts of school leader diversity, the measurement and evaluation of principal job performance, and how principals make human talent management decisions in their schools.

Grissom’s coauthored article on how principal time management skills influences their time use, job stress, and job performance won the 2016 A. Ross Thomas Award for best article in the Journal of Educational Administration. His study of school board conflict, “Is Discord Detrimental? Using Institutional Variation to Identify the Impact of Public Governing Board Conflict on Outcomes,” won the Beryl Radin Award from the Public Management Research Association for best article published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory in 2014. He also conducts research on mobility among educators, which has included numerous studies of turnover among teachers, principals, and superintendents.

Additionally, with a variety of colleagues, Professor Grissom has published a stream of articles on the concept of bureaucratic representation that investigate how the race and gender composition of the K-12 public education workforce matters for the distribution of resources and outcomes among diverse groups. A 2011 article he coauthored in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management on how teacher-principal race congruence affects teacher job outcomes (“A Supervisor Like Me: Race, Representation, and the Satisfaction and Turnover Decisions of Public Sector Employees)” won the Wilder Award for Scholarship in Social Equity and Public Policy, co-sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration and the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Grissom co-edited the 2016 book Improving Teacher Evaluation Systems: Making the Most of Multiple Measures (Teachers College Press) with Peter Youngs. With Anna Egalite and Constance Lindsay, he authored the 2021 Wallace Foundation report How Principals Affect Students and Schools, which synthesizes two decades of research on school principals. He is past editor of Educational Researcher and past associate editor of Education Finance and Policy.

Grissom is former president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Professor Grissom holds a Masters degree in Education and a PhD in Political Economics from Stanford University.