Rachel Dinkes
Rachel Dinkes is a principal researcher at AIR. Throughout her career at AIR, Dr. Dinkes has provided support expertise to projects supporting the United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). For NCES, Dr. Dinkes is leading, and co-author with NCES on the (forthcoming) seminal, congressionally- mandated report, Study of the Title I, Part A Grant Program Mathematical Formulas. This report responds to a mandate under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to examine the federal allocation and distribution of Title I funds to understand whether existing formulas benefit or unduly disadvantage any school districts. As a part of this project, Dr. Dinkes helped oversee the development of a school-district Comparable Wage-Index (CWI) to provide insight on the actual purchasing power of federal funds.
In her current position supporting NCES, Dr. Dinkes serves as a United States delegate to three Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) education groups. Dr. Dinkes ensures that the United States data is comparable with other countries who have unique educational systems, that the United States is accurately and fairly portrayed in the report, and that the United State's interests are represented at the bi-annual meetings for each of the three groups. Dr. Dinkes is also a contact for other country representatives who have questions about the United States educational system or data.
Dr. Dinkes is also responsible for developing and producing the first ever U.S. national report for the International Early Learning Study (IELS) which will provide comparable indicators on student performance and schooling practices across countries. Prior to her graduate work, she was a Survey Statistician at the U.S. Bureau of the Census.