I have had a very unusual academic journey compared to the growth and experiences scholars of education policy typically have. Initially, I entered the Education Policy department as a qualitative ethnographer, trained in both social theories from the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as qualitative methods and design. My qualitative training included conducting focus groups, field observations, interviews, and qualitative document analysis. Before becoming a quantitative economist and game theorist, I had the experience of conducting independent qualitative research on the unintended consequences of Act 10 in the teacher labor market in a case study of a rural Wisconsin School district, working with IRB, and presenting my findings at the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference.

The economic aspects of my qualitative research captured my passion for improving state and federal policies to decrease inequity and advance social justice; unlike most qualitative ethnographers, I already had the mathematical and programming skills to pursue econometric work and mathematical economic modeling. When I switched to economics, I found that most economists lacked anthropological and sociological content knowledge and an understanding of the qualitative process and ethnographic methods. I found that I could not only communicate and collaborate across multidisciplinary settings between ethnographers and economists or quantitative sociologists/psychologists but that I could harmonize and synchronize the quantitative goals of a project with the qualitative goals of the project into a unified vision. When Covid-19 emerged, I formulated my qualitative findings into a game theoretic formulation as the foundation for a quasi-experimental methodology. In my job market paper, I rely on quasi-experimental methods, specifically, an instrumental variable approach to causal mediation analysis and inverse probability weighting, utilizing intra-state variation in the implementation of an unrelated district-level policy as a natural experiment to estimate the effect of a California state policy on the educational outcomes of its English Learner student population.