Faculty

CREO continues to build an outstanding research faculty to advance its mission.  Director Mark Berends and Professors Maureen Hallinan, Bill Carbonaro, Megan Andrews, and Amy Langenkamp conduct systematic, theoretically grounded empirical research on effective practices and policies in Catholic and public schools.  CREO graduate students actively collaborate with faculty on these research projects.  Several CREO projects focus on inequality in achievement and attainment outcomes.

Professor Berends and his students are working on several projects that are part of the National Center on School Choice, which he directs.  The "What Makes School Work?" project is looking for a national sample of charter and traditional public schools and analyzing student achievement gains in relation to each school's curriculum, instruction, and organizational conditions.  On another project, he is working with students to examine different measures of teacher effectiveness.  

Professor Maureen Hallinan continues to analyze the effects of school characteristics, including school sector, on student social and cognitive outcomes, relying on data from the Chicago School Study. She and Catherine Liu, a CREO Ph.D., are studying the effects of student participation in Catholic school practices on effort and self-efficacy.  She also is completing a comparison of student academic achievement in Chicago Catholic and public schools.

William Carbonaro studies educational inequality in achievement, attainment, and labor market outcomes. His work has appeared in highly regarded journals, such as Sociology of Education, Social Forces, and the American Sociological Review. Much of his past research on student achievement describes how inequalities in learning outcomes are connected to unequal learning opportunities that vary across schools and classrooms. He has also published several papers that describe how institutional features of labor markets affect the relationships between schooling, cognitive skills, and earnings. His current research examines how students’ academic outcomes in high school are affected by characteristics of their peer networks, and their close/distant friendship ties. He is also studying how educational credentials affect earnings growth and the risk of income loss during workers’ careers.

CREO welcomes new faculty members Megan Andrew and Amy Langenkamp.   Professor Andrew is currently working on research on the intergenerational transmission of different types of post-secondary education and how parental influence and investments shape this transmission to the next generation as well as research on decision-making in education and expectation formation. Professor Langenkamp is currently researching the role of social networks and community organizations in access to postsecondary schooling among immigrant students.