Christina Weiland

Christina Weiland is the Karl and Martha Kohn Professor of Social Policy and a professor at the University of Michigan's Marsal Family School of Education, and has affiliations with the Educational Studies department, the Combined Program in Psychology and Education program, and the Ford School's Education Policy Initiative. She also serves as core faculty for the University of Michigan’s Predoctoral Training Program and Postdoctoral Training Program in Causal Inference in Education Policy Research.

Dr. Weiland’s research focuses on the effects of early childhood interventions and public policies on children’s development, especially on children from low-income families. She is particularly interested in the active ingredients that drive children’s gains in successful, at-scale public preschool programs. She is also interested in quantitative research methods, educational measurement, and developmental processes research. Her work is also characterized by strong, long-standing research collaborations with practitioners, particularly the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood.

Currently, she co-directs (with JoAnn Hsueh, MDRC) a five-year longitudinal descriptive study of the preschool to third-grade experiences of Boston Public School students as part of the Institute of Education Sciences’ Early Learning Network. She also serves as principal investigator of a large-scale, Institute of Education Sciences-funded study of the longitudinal impacts of the Boston Public Schools prekindergarten on children’s reading and mathematics skills, grade retention, and special education placement through the end of third grade and of variation in these impacts across student subgroups and schools. She is also a 2014 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and received the 2018 Association for Education Finance and Policy Early Career Award. Previously, she served as project director and co-PI of Preparing to Succeed, an IES-funded study of the impacts of the Boston prekindergarten program on children’s kindergarten readiness.

For her work on the study, she was awarded a Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2013. She is also part of the evaluation team of Un Buen Comienzo, a preschool teacher professional development program in Santiago, Chile, and she was a postdoctoral fellow on the Secondary Analysis of Variation in Impact (SAVI) Study of Head Start. Her work has been generously funded by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, Chile’s Ministry of Education and the University of Michigan. She has presented her work on preschool to the Seattle City Council, to senior U.S. Department of Education officials, and at a Congressional briefing, at U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee and U.S. Senate HELP Committee briefing, among others.

Listen to Weiland's latest podcast, Challenges to early childhood education in the wake of COVID-19.