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H. Alix Gallagher

Senior Researcher

H. Alix Gallagher, Ph.D., focuses on teacher quality and various policies designed to improve teachers' knowledge, skills, and instructional practices. She leads national, state and local studies of teacher quality, performance pay, and inservice professional development. Dr. Gallagher has experience with both quantitative and qualitative research methods including randomized trials, quasi-experimental designs, and implementation of mixed methods program evaluations.

Dr. Gallagher is currently the co-principal investigator for the National Evaluation of Writing Project Professional Development. This 4-year national randomized trial evaluates the impact of partnership work delivered by National Writing Project (NWP) sites on participating schools, teachers, and students. Interviews, observations, a teacher survey and document review are used to understand the professional development delivered through the NWP-school partnerships. A teacher survey, teacher logs, teachers' assignments, the corresponding student work, and on-demand student writing prompts measure the impact of the partnerships on school, teacher, and student outcomes.

Dr. Gallagher is also the project director for the National Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) program. TIF is a large federal program designed to increase the use of financial incentives for school administrators and teachers. Educators receive rewards for student performance, teaching quality, participation in professional development, and taking on new roles (such as coaching other teachers on effective instructional practices). The implementation portion of the study uses interviews and surveys to understand the range of incentive models being tried under TIF, while a feasibility study investigates the best strategies for estimating the effects of the program on the educator labor market and student outcomes. If feasible, an outcomes study will be conducted in the later years of the evaluation.

Previously, Dr. Gallagher served as co-principal investigator for the evaluation of the California Subject Matter Projects (CSMP) and a series of smaller research activities for the CSMP. These studies used surveys, data base analysis, interviews, case studies, and student achievement analyses to describe the work of the CSMP and its effects on participating teachers and their students.  Dr. Gallagher also was the project manager for a national study of the impact of National Board certified teachers (NBCTs) on low-performing schools. This study uses a survey of a stratified random sample of NBCTs and case studies of low-performing schools with a high concentration of NBCTs to investigate the factors that inhibit and promote NBCTs' abilities to have a schoolwide impact. Dr. Gallagher was also a researcher on the study of Arts Education in California. This study used data from principal surveys, district case studies, and analyses of secondary databases to document the status of arts education in California to examine the allocation of resources for arts education in elementary schools in four states.

Before coming to SRI, Dr. Gallagher worked for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There her work focused on school finance and using value-added measures of student achievement to investigate innovative teacher evaluation and compensation systems. Dr. Gallagher received her Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to her work in education policy analysis, she taught for several years in the Houston Independent School District in Texas and in the Phoenix Elementary School District in Arizona.