American Institutes for Research

Jesse Levin is a principal research economist at AIR, where he has directed projects investigating school finance equity and adequacy, resource allocation, and educational effectiveness. He currently serves as the director of several cost analysis/cost effectiveness components of randomized control trial studies for various educational interventions, and recently served as the director of a national study of district weighted student funding systems and as deputy director for a national study of Title I resource allocation, both funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Levin also recently conducted studies of the cost of providing an adequate education to students attending K-12 public schools in California and a comparative analysis of spending in California charter and traditional schools. In addition, he previously directed a study comparing charter and traditional school funding in Maryland, as well as high-profile educational adequacy studies in California, New Mexico and New York, investigations of educator supply and demand in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, evaluations of state school finance systems in Hawaii, Nevada and Pennsylvania, and studies of educational resource allocation and effectiveness both within and across school districts. His work at AIR over the past 18 years has drawn upon his expertise in applied econometrics and quantitative methods.

Dr. Levin is an appointed member of the California Practitioner Advisory Group, which advises the California State Board of Education, participates in the California Department of Education Technical Design Group, serves a board trustee in his local district (Pacifica School District), and sits on the San Mateo County School Boards Association Executive Committee. In addition, he is a co-recipient of the Association of Educational Service Agencies 2007 E. Robert Stephens Award for the research study Similar Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better? A Large-Scale Survey of California Elementary Schools Serving Low-Income Students. His articles have appeared in Economics of Education Review, Empirical Economics, Labour Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, and Peabody Journal of Education. He also regularly serves as a referee for several peer reviewed journals (Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, Educational Policy, Empirical Economics and Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness).

Prior to his work at AIR, Dr. Levin served as an economics researcher for the Institute for Research of Schooling, Labor Market and Economic Development (SCHOLAR) in the Netherlands, where he conducted research in the economics of education and labor economics and performed major countrywide studies of the efficacy of class size reduction, the differences in the effectiveness of private versus public schooling, and measuring the rate of return to educational investment.