\Q & A\
Back Where She Began
Education economics policy expert A. Brooks Bowden, GED’07, recently earned tenure at her alma mater—the place that first introduced her to her field.
by Rebecca Raber
Photo credit: Joe McFetridge for Penn GSE
P
enn GSE’s A. Brooks Bowden isn’t just a faculty member, she’s also a proud alum. An associate professor in education policy, she earned her master’s degree in educational policy at the School where she now trains the future of the profession. In a nice bit of symmetry, her current office on the fourth floor of 3700 Walnut Street formerly belonged to her mentor, Professor Emerita of Education and Social Policy Rebecca A. Maynard. “That was intentional,” said Bowden, who credits Maynard’s “Economics of Education” class as an early inspiration for her professional path.
Since graduating from Penn GSE, Bowden earned her PhD at Columbia University, conducted research at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education—a center now housed at Penn that she directs—and joined the Penn GSE faculty, where she earned tenure earlier this year.
Her research focuses on program evaluation and economic analysis with the aim of mitigating poverty-related challenges that prevent students from experiencing the full value of schooling. She co-authored the primary text on cost-effectiveness, Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit-Cost Analysis, and is an editor of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Bowden spoke with us about making a career change from psychology to educational policy, why she wanted to work at her alma mater, and the partnerships that make her work possible.
You started your academic and professional career in psychology. How did you make the turn to educational policy?
Mostly my work was with little kids, birth to age eight, and was focused on behavior—thinking about the way that learning happens, thinking about language. But at a certain point, instead of spending my days with children, I was spending my days teaching other people to work with children, working on IEPs and with school systems, and trying to help families find resources. I felt like the research we were relying on [to inform that work] was often very old. Those concerns are really what drove me to reconsider my path. I decided research was the way to really make change, and that’s how I learned about policy. I realized that I could apply all of the really strong research and social science training I had in psychology to social policy. And then at Penn, I learned about the economics of education. . . . And so today, I’m a social scientist who focuses on policy with the lenses of psychology and economics.
What is it like to work at the school you went to?
[When I came to Penn,] I wanted to do rigorous causal research toward understanding if policies and programs work. I wanted to inform public resource allocation to try to improve the lives of children, and Penn helped me to find a way to do that. . . . And then when I heard that Penn was hiring, it was like another moment of “I can’t believe it!” Because this is the place that changed my life, this is the place that gave me this path. And so, the opportunity to go back to this place and to be that change agent for other people was very, very exciting.
What is the focus of your current research?
I have a couple of things that started with the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education moving here. One of them has been a partnership with NYU, the International Rescue Committee, and Sesame Workshop, with funding from the LEGO Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, working with families and children with extreme levels of vulnerability because of refugee crises. We’ve contributed to five cost-effectiveness evaluations of displaced families and children in many different contexts in humanitarian settings. . . . Other new work that is starting, that’s been in development since around 2020, is a partnership with [the state of] North Carolina, where we have truly co-constructed research questions that use data from both education and the Department of Health and Human Services—things like TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families] child care subsidies, early childhood education opportunities, and other social support services that tend to be targeted for early childhood years. We will look at that with data from education to think about ways that we can use large data to inform our understanding of children more holistically. Ultimately, we want to consider how we can use data to better allocate resources and to inform public investments in children and families.
“What is vulnerability? How is it conceptualized? How much of that is poverty? How much of that is income? How can we use large data to think about vulnerability?”
— A. Brooks Bowden
What kinds of questions, specifically, are you hoping to answer with that data?
Our early education system is really very focused, from an education policy perspective, on what skills children have at the end of third grade. Part of this project is really rooted in thinking about our K–3 students and how they are prepared for school and how they move through school. There is a focus across the U.S. on literacy by the end of third grade, so one of the questions I started with is, “Why third grade?” . . . We also are focusing on questions related to readiness, especially “kindergarten readiness”— what does that mean? With the DHHS data, we’re able to add big-picture questions around vulnerability and access to services: What is vulnerability? How is it conceptualized? How much of that is poverty? How much of that is income? How can we use large data to think about vulnerability? That’s actually not as clear as you might think—there’s actually not a great set of definitions. Another big question is around access and who has access to social support systems and what barriers exist for families to participate.
How has your research had impact in the “real world”?
I’ve been very lucky to have been able to do policy-relevant work from very early on in my career. It’s tricky to say, “My work did this or that,” because it is not that straightforward in policy to know what was influential. My approach was to do good work by listening to my colleagues in the field. The work I did on integrated support services was designed to reflect practice and to inform policy. Then, after the work was done, I was invited to share that work in Massachusetts with the education committee of the legislature. That was such a remarkable experience to be in that beautiful space with elected officials and to get to hear their questions and thoughts. Then, in North Carolina, I built on that work by studying the economic aspects of school food. I started the work by meeting with the governor’s office, legislators, and senators. I listened to issues their constituents were facing. Then, the time I spent and the effort that went into the work felt worthwhile when those policymakers allocated state budget funds to provide lunch for no fee to students who qualified for reduced-price lunch. At the end of the day, my job is to do the best work that I can and to produce the most rigorous, high-quality science that I can, and to partner with people so that the work is meaningful to them. They take the work and do things with it, and that’s where the magic happens, right? It really is about a being part of this ecosystem of how science informs policy, but being very intentional about doing work that is created with partnership in mind.