Digital Strategy Internship: AJ Fletcher Foundation
Research Mission
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a long tradition of supporting research on significant public policy issues and allocating intellectual and financial resources toward research on the state, the status of its citizens, and its attempts to make social progress. The Carolina Institute for Public Policy aims to be a focal point for public policy research and outreach. The purpose of the Carolina Institute is to provide an environment within which top scholars in fields such as education policy, economic development policy, health policy, public finance, and environmental policy can thrive, producing top quality research and engaging with the public, policymakers, journalists and other scholars on significant policy issues. The Carolina Institute plans to support the policy research enterprise and communication of the findings by creating a visible, central Institute within the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, which can:
- Link policy scholars with those seeking information on policy alternatives;
- develop research to investigate new, emerging and under-studied public policy issues; and
- convene scholars, policymakers and the public to discuss, debate, and deliberate important public policy issues.
The vision for the Carolina Institute is to become an organization that can support and enhance public policy research centers, programs, and projects and inform policymakers, journalists and the public about significant public policy issues facing North Carolina, the nation, and countries across the globe. The Carolina Institute will not be limited to a single policy issue or to any particular perspective on solving social problems. The Carolina Institute will develop projects and programs of research on particular topics when scholarly interests and external support align to signify that rigorous policy research and lively debate is needed for society to progress.
The Carolina Institute will serve as a host for scholarly research and a locus for outreach activities. In response to a survey of faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, 210 faculty members indicated they were engaged in policy related research, citing child policy, disability policy, economic development policy, education policy, energy policy, environmental policy among others as areas in which they were engaged. In addition, the faculty indicated a strong desire to engage in interdisciplinary research and to make their research more widely known to policymakers, journalists, and the public. Accordingly, the Carolina Institute will provide key resources for sponsored program development and administration, data management, data analysis, human resource management, communications, meeting logistics, and other functions that are critical to policy research and outreach functions.
Current Fellows
Gustavo Angles
Dr. Angeles is Research Assistant Professor in UNC’s Department of Maternal and Child Health. An Economist by training, his research interests are in health and human development in low-income countries and social program evaluation. He is Senior Evaluation Advisor at the MEASURE Project, and is a Co-Investigator with Dr. Sudhanshu Handa on large scale impact evaluations of cash transfer programs in Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Lora Cohen-Vogel
Lora Cohen-Vogel is the Robena and Walter E. Hussman, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and Reform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Looking in particular at teacher quality and assignment reforms, her research connects the study of federal and state education reforms to larger bands of work in political science. As Co-principal Investigator and Associate Director of the five-year, $13.6 million National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, Lora is particularly interested in identifying the programs, policies and practices of schools that are successfully raising schooling outcomes for traditionally underperforming students. Among other foci, this work looks at how schools use data to help raise learning outcomes for low-income, minority and ELL students. In related work, Lora considers what she calls “evidence-based assignment” and the ways student performance data is used by principals to hire, assign and dismiss their teachers. Her articles have appeared in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the American Educational Research Journal, and the American Journal of Education, among other outlets. Lora served as president of the Politics of Education Association from 2008-2010.
Gary Henry
Gary T. Henry is a Patricia and Rodes Hart Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organization, Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. He formerly held the Duncan MacRae ’09 and Rebecca Kyle MacRae Professorship of Public Policy in the Department of Public Policy and directed the Carolina Institute for Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Also, he is a Fellow with the Frank Porter Graham Institute for Child Development and research professor in the Department of Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. Henry specializes in education policy, educational evaluation, teacher quality research, and quantitative research methods. He has published extensively in top journals such as Science, Educational Researcher, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Teacher Education, and Evaluation Review.
All tenure-track faculty members in the Department of Public Policy are also Fellows of the Carolina Institute of Public Policy (CIPP). The CIPP also invites faculty and research affiliates from outside the department to become Fellows. These are individuals who have research and engagement interests in Public Policy, and whose work contributes to the mission of the CIPP. Further information about becoming an affiliated Fellow can be obtained from the Director, Professor Sudhanshu Handa (shanda@email.unc.edu).