American Institutes for Research

Steven Hurlburt is a principal researcher at AIR with more than thirteen years of research and evaluation experience, specializing in Title I implementation, school improvement, and federal and state accountability. At present, Hurlburt is the task lead for the case study component on the Study of Weighted Funding Systems and a senior team member on the Study of Title I Schoolwide and Targeted Assistance Programs, for which he will be leading data collection activities at several case study schools.

Hurlburt is also a co-project director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Frontier Set Evaluation—a four-year, mixed-methods evaluation of 35 two- and four-year higher education institutions simultaneously implementing a set of three student success interventions—for which he provides conceptual and technical leadership for all data collection and analysis activities. He is also the task leader for quantitative analyses for the Study of the Early Implementation of ESEA Flexibility Provisions, for which he is responsible for designing and conduct quantitative analyses of school-level achievement and accountability data for states that received ESEA flexibility waivers, and a site lead for the Massachusetts Monitoring Site Visit project, leading interviews and focus groups in several Level 4 and Level 5 schools to provide state leaders information on schools’ progress towards stated turnaround goals.

Previously, Hurlburt served as deputy director of the Study of School Turnaround, a large-scale case study investigation of the implementation of the School Improvement Grants (SIG) under ARRA. He worked as task leader for EDFacts data collection for ED’s School Improvement Status and Outcomes for Students with Disabilities Study, a descriptive study examining the relationship between school accountability status and the academic outcomes of students with disabilities and as task leader on the Data Analysis on Title I School Improvement Grants Task Order, on which he led descriptive analyses of extant data from EDFacts and the national SIG database to examine changes in student outcomes and leading indicators in SIG schools. Hurlburt also worked on the National Evaluation of Title III Implementation for which he co-authored a policy brief focused on the state of Title III implementation in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and the Student of State Implementation of NCLB for which he administered interviews with state directors of assessment, accountability, and Title I.