Katharine O. Strunk is the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is nationally renowned for her partner-driven research and leadership, which has brought multimethod, collaborative scholarship to bear on pressing questions facing education and educators. She partners extensively with district and state policy makers, including working with the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California and Michigan Departments of Education. She served as the only researcher on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Student Recovery Advisory Council, which informed COVID-19 recovery efforts in schools statewide. She has also advised on numerous major local and state education reforms.
Dr. Strunk served as president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) in 2021–2022. She is a member of the Executive Leadership Board for the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH). From 2017 to 2023, she served as director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) at Michigan State University, which partners with the Michigan Department of Education and local school districts to craft targeted research that is a priority for policymakers and educators.
Prior to joining Penn GSE, Dr. Strunk was the Clifford E. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Education and a professor of education policy and by courtesy economics at Michigan State University. From 2009 to 2017 she served on the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and Sol Price School of Public Policy. She began her career at the University of California at Davis School of Education, serving on the faculty from 2007 to 2009. Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Strunk is an award-winning expert on K–12 education governance, including teachers’ unions, collective bargaining agreements, and portfolio management models, as well as teacher labor markets, school turnaround, and accountability policies. Rooted in the fields of economics and public policy, her work centers on structures that are central to state and district operations and policy and the ways these structures affect policymakers’ decisions and outcomes. In her research, she pays particular attention to the ways that policies and programs impact the most traditionally underserved communities.
Dr. Strunk’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals as well as through numerous policy reports written in service of improving policy and practice. She is a co-author of Challenging the One Best System (2020, Harvard Education Press), which offers a comparative analysis of the set of urban education governance reforms collectively known as the “portfolio management model.”
In her current research, she focuses on working with local and state education agencies on studies that will help them inform policy and practice. Her work has been supported by state and federal contracts and grants as well as by philanthropic partners. She has raised more than $21 million in extramural funding over the course of her career.