Bio & Research

Following two years as an AmeriCorps volunteer in public schools, Daniel worked as a paraprofessional and consultant helping migrant families navigate the public school system. He earned a Masters in Teaching in 2003, after which he taught middle school and high school English Language Arts for 12 years. In 2015, teaching as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education at Lewis & Clark College. This experience sparked an interest in education policy related to attracting and retaining teachers, as well as to research surrounding student-teacher relationships.

Daniel began doctoral studies in education in 2017 at the University of Colorado Boulder with a focus on educational policy and foundations. Soon building a passion for quantitative research methods, he moved to the Research and Evaluation Methodology (REM) program, where, working under the tutelage of Drs. Allison Atteberry, Mimi Engel, and Derek Briggs, he honed a skillset in quasi-experimental and experimental design, program evaluation, and educational measurement. He expects to graduate with a Ph.D. in Research and Evaluation Methodology in April, 2023.

Daniel's research interests remain grounded in his career as a public school teacher, during which he observed educational stakeholders' responses to NCLB-era legislation and the ESSA reauthorization. As a result, he became interested in how public schools craft and adopt policies meant to improve student performance, attract and retain highly-effective teachers, evaluate teacher quality, and direct school resources equitably and sustainably to where they are most needed. He also became focused on how policy is evaluated and how policymakers know whether their programs are achieving their stated goals.

Daniel's doctoral work includes building and sustaining a Research Practice Partnership (RPP) with Denver Public Schools. As part of this partnership, he has investigated the effects of teacher incentive payment programs, teacher and school leader evaluation systems, and a teacher career ladder program on a wide range of student, teacher, and school-level outcomes. The partnership also aids the district in designing, managing, and evaluation teacher surveys meant to gauge job satisfaction and retention patterns. Stemming from his teaching experience, Daniel's dissertation focuses on the impact of multi-year student-teacher groupings ("looping") on a variety of student and teacher outcomes.