Hanley Chiang

Hanley Chiang is an expert in designing rigorous program evaluations in education and has conducted extensive research on measuring and improving teacher and principal effectiveness.

Chiang has held leading roles on large-scale evaluations sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to examine critical policy issues related to teacher quality. He is a principal investigator for a large random assignment evaluation of educator merit pay programs funded by the Teacher Incentive Fund. Chiang also led the analysis of student achievement data for a random assignment evaluation of math teachers from Teach For America and the Teaching Fellows programs.

Chiang has directed several projects to help education agencies develop or refine measures of educator effectiveness. He led a study to assess the validity and reliability of Pennsylvania’s tool for evaluating school principals, and he is currently leading a study to examine the accuracy of principal performance measures based on student test scores. He has served as a principal investigator for developing pilot measures of teacher effectiveness for a large network of charter schools, and coauthored a widely cited report on error rates in value-added models for measuring school and teacher effectiveness.

Chiang’s research spans several other key policy issues, including school accountability and alternative education for dropouts and other at-risk students. He has also made methodological contributions, coauthoring research on quantifying uncertainty in cluster randomized trials and developing evidence standards for random assignment studies that have noncompliance. He is currently a co-principal investigator on a study to assess methods for estimating program effects away from the cutoff in regression discontinuity designs. Chiang’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Education Finance and Policy, Evaluation Review, Advances in Econometrics, and Statistics and Public Policy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.