Taylor Named Professor of Education

Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Nonie Lesaux has announced the promotion of Eric Taylor, a scholar whose work focuses on using personnel economics to inform educational policy and the teacher workforce. Taylor has been named professor of education, effective July 1.

“I am enormously grateful to my colleagues at HGSE, Harvard, and beyond,” says Taylor. “It is reassuring to have their vote of trust in the form of this promotion. And I am honored I will be able to call them my colleagues for many years to come.”

Taylor joined the Ed School in 2015 as an assistant professor, already well-known as a quantitative researcher focused on educational equity. He was promoted to associate professor at HGSE in 2020. Taylor’s research draws from the tools of personnel economics to inform policy related to the teacher workforce. Using methods of applied microeconomics, he tests hypotheses about the sources of variation in teacher performance, raising important questions and thinking creatively about how to answer them.

“Eric’s groundbreaking research draws on economic theory, his own deep knowledge of the teaching profession, and clever, rigorous methodology to generate new insights on one of the most pressing issues in education worldwide: how to best hire, support, and retain effective teachers,” says Lesaux. “His scholarship not only enriches our understanding of teachers’ work in districts and classrooms, it also shapes policy focused on strengthening the education workforce. Eric’s portfolio demonstrates how research can and should serve as driving force for progress on complex problems in education.”

Taylor currently serves as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at CESifo, and is affiliated with the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. He is currently a co-editor at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Taylor’s own research into hiring decisions, job design, training, and job performance evaluation has helped students at the Ed. School conduct their own research into the economics of education, helping a new generation of educators make an impact on the field with their own work.

“The highlight of my job is working with graduate students on their research,” says Taylor. “Their experience and creativity generate a wide variety of research topics and econometric problems. A much wider variety than I would otherwise get to spend time working on. I am very happy that will continue, with both current and future students.”

“Eric’s contributions to the HGSE community are also outstanding. He teaches highly rated courses on applied causal inference and quantitative methods, and is co-instructor for the Education Policy and Analysis (EPA) Program Core Experience,” says Lesaux. “He also serves as chair of the Ph.D. concentration in Education Policy and Program Evaluation (EPPE). Eric is widely respected as an outstanding adviser and dedicated mentor to our students. I am just thrilled to welcome Eric to the senior faculty.”

A prolific fundraiser with a strong publication record, Taylor’s work has appeared in the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Labor Economics, and featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Education Week. He earned his Ph.D. in the Economics of Education from Stanford University in 2015.

Much of Taylor’s work focuses on the employment relationships between teachers and schools, and how that relationship changes in response to performance evaluation. He notes that “perhaps now I will spend slightly less time overthinking my own performance evaluation” with the news of his own tenure announcement.