Martin West

Martin West
Martin West
Professor of Education,
Harvard University

Martin West studies the politics of K–12 education and how education policies affect student learning and social-emotional development. He is a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and editor-in-chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. He is deputy director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance as well as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. He previously worked as senior advisor to the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; taught at Brown University; and was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution. West received his PhD in government and social policy from Harvard University.

updated 2020

Publications by Martin West
Prior work has shown that levels of self-reported student social-emotional learning (SEL) predict student achievement levels—as well as student achievement gains—but little has been done to understand if within-student changes in student reports of…
Evidence From the First Large-Scale Panel Student Survey
A growing number of school systems use self-report surveys to track students’ social-emotional development as a tool to inform policy and practice. In this article, the first large-scale panel survey of social-emotional learning (SEL) simulates how…
Findings From the First Large-Scale Panel Survey of Students
Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools for assessing the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures use standardized tests as the outcome of interest, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the…
When California became the second state to authorize charter schools in 1992, the state’s system for authorization, oversight, and renewal of charter schools was in many ways a bold experiment. The concept was new, and the impacts on both student…