Christina Weiland

Associate Professor, Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan

Christina Weiland is an associate professor at the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan and (by courtesy) the Ford School of Public Policy, where she is affiliated with the Educational Studies department and the Combined Program in Psychology and Education program. She serves as co-Director of the Education Policy Initiative at the Ford School of Public Policy and as Director of the University of Michigan’s Predoctoral Training Program in Causal Inference in Education Policy Research. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Urban Institute.

Dr. Weiland’s research focuses on the effects of early childhood interventions and public policies on children’s development, especially on children from families with low-incomes. She is particularly interested in the active ingredients that drive children’s gains in successful, at-scale public preschool programs. She is also interested in quantitative research methods, educational measurement, and developmental processes research. Her work is also characterized by strong, long-standing research collaborations with practitioners, particularly the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood.

Her current projects include a longitudinal descriptive study of the preschool to fifth grade experiences of Boston Public School students as part of the Institute of Education Sciences’ Early Learning Network

She is also PI of a large-scale, Institute of Education Sciences-funded study of the longitudinal impacts of the Boston Public Schools prekindergarten into early adulthood, as well as an implementation study of Boston’s scale out to community-based preschool programs. In partnership with the Michigan Department of Education, she leads (with Brian Jacob) an evaluation of Michigan’s Transitional Kindergarten program. She also serves as co-PI on a lottery-based evaluation of the DC UPK program.

Her work has been recognized with a 2018 Association for Education Finance and Policy Early Career Award, a 2014 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a 2013 Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Her work has been generously funded by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the Foundation for Child Development, Chile’s Ministry of Education, and the University of Michigan. She has presented her work on preschool to the Seattle City Council, to senior U.S. Department of Education officials, and at a Congressional briefing, at U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee and U.S. Senate HELP Committee briefing, among others.

She holds an EdD (quantitative policy analysis in education) and a MA from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a BA from Dartmouth College.