Overview
Helen F. Ladd is the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Her education research focuses on school finance and accountability, teacher labor markets, school choice, and early childhood programs. With colleagues at Duke University and UNC, she has used rich longitudinal administrative data from North Caroline to study school segregation, teacher labor markets, teacher quality, charter schools, and early childhood programs. With her husband, Edward Fiske, she has written books and articles on education reform efforts in New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and England.
She is the co-author or co-editor of 12 books. These include Holding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education (Brookings Institution, 1996); The Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy (2008 and second edition 2015), books on school reform in New Zealand and South Africa, and Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision Making (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
From 1996-99 she co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance. In that capacity she is the co-editor of two books: a set of background papers, Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance and the final report, Making Money Matter: Financing America’s Schools.
In 2011, she was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education. During 2016 and 2017 she served as a member of a National Academy study of financing early care and education with a highly qualified workforce. She is currently a member of the N.C. Governor's Commission on Access to a Sound, Basic Education.
She was president of the Association for Public Policy and Management in 2011 and, from its founding in 2008 until 2017 was co-chair of the national campaign for a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.
Prior to 1986, she taught at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and at Harvard University, first in the City and Regional Planning Program and then in the Kennedy School of Government. She graduated with a B.A. degree from Wellesley College in 1967, received a master's degree from the London School of Economics in 1968, and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1974.
Early in her career, her research focused on state and local public finance, and she was active in the National Tax Association, which she served as president in 1993-94. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a senior research fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
With the support of two Fulbright grants, she spent the spring term of 1998 in New Zealand studying that country’s education system and the spring term of 2002 doing similar research in South Africa. More recently, she spent a term as a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam examining the Netherlands’ long experience with parental choice and weighted student funding, and two months in London at the Institute for Fiscal Studies pursuing research on school improvement and English academies.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Pre-K Enrollments and Teaching Environments in North Carolina Elementary Schools.
Journal Article Children and youth services review · September 2024 Prior research finds that some high-quality preschool programs are successful in generating significant initial academic gains and long-term benefits for students as they progress through school. This study examines one of the mechanisms through which Nort ... Full text CiteRACIAL DIFFERENCES IN STUDENT ACCESS TO HIGH-QUALITY TEACHERS
Journal Article Education Finance and Policy · September 1, 2023 Access to high-quality teachers in K–12 schools differs systematically by racial group. This policy brief reviews the academic research documenting these differences and the labor market forces and segregation patterns that solidify them. It also presents ... Full text CiteUnderstanding Heterogeneity in the Impact of Public Preschool Programs.
Journal Article Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · June 2023 We examine the North Carolina Pre-K (NC Pre-K) program to test the hypothesis that observed variation in effects resulting from exposure to the program can be attributed to interactions with other environmental factors that occur before, during, or after t ... Full text Open Access CiteRecent Grants
CALDER Project 4.0
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by American Institutes for Research · 2021 - 2023Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research - CALDER
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by American Institutes for Research · 2017 - 2019Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research - CALDER
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by American Institutes for Research · 2013 - 2018View All Grants