Research Associate,
Education Policy Center
The Urban Institute
2100 M Street, NW
Washington, DC 20037
zxu@urban.org

Ph.D., Economics and Education, Columbia University
Curriculum Vitae
Expertise: teacher labor markets, teacher quality, value-added modeling

Biography

Zeyu Xu is a Research Associate with the Education Policy Center at the  Urban Institute and an affiliated reseacher with CALDER. He has extensive experience in analyzing longitudinal administrative data that link students to classrooms and teachers.

His current research primarily focuses on two important policy issues: the use of value-added models in evaluating teacher effectiveness/teacher quality and pay for performance.  These include: evaluating the effectiveness of Teach for America teachers in secondary schools, comparing teacher value-added in high poverty and low poverty schools, evaluating the effect of Education Department’s Teacher Incentives Fund, and evaluating the validity of value-added measures in terms of their accuracy and potential bias. Additionally, Dr. Xu has led studies on student mobility and design parameters in clustered randomization studies.

Dr. Xu has published on other topics such as student mobility, early childhood education, and education in the global context. He was project manager of the Statistical Standards Project at the Education Statistics Services Institute (ESSI) in AIR prior to joining the Urban Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics of Education and a M.S. in Applied Statistics from Columbia University.