CCFP 25th Anniversary Spotlight: Q&A with Helen “Sunny” Ladd

As part of the Center for Child and Family Policy's 25th Anniversary celebration, we are honoring faculty, researchers, and staff who have contributed to the Center's work, culture, and impact.

Helen “Sunny” Ladd is the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and was a professor at the Sanford School from 1986 to 2017.

Read on to learn more about Sunny’s work with the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC) housed at the Center for Child and Family Policy, her first international research trip, and a central takeaway from her research.

How did you first become involved with the Center for Child and Family Policy?

Although my initial research and professional activities centered on state and local public finance, a year at the Brookings Institution in 1994-95 shifted the focus of my research to education policy.  The establishment of the Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) in 1999 provided a natural home for my growing research interests in teachers, educational accountability, and student achievement. The Center’s data center, the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC), was central to my involvement at CCFP and my research success.

Can you share a bit about the importance of the North Carolina Education Research Data Center?

In the late 1990s, I was part of a small group of researchers from both Duke and UNC who, with funding from the Spencer Foundation, worked with the N.C. Department of Public Instruction to establish a partnership to store and manage confidential data on the state’s individual students, public schools, and teachers. The intent was to make such data available to university researchers and nonprofit research institutions in North Carolina and elsewhere. Initially a joint project between Duke and UNC, it soon became the North Carolina Education Research Data Center housed at Duke.

As an economist by training, I was well aware of the value of high-quality data. It was clear that the availability of detailed student-level data that could be matched to teachers and classrooms over time would open up new research opportunities and, importantly, strengthen the case for additional research funding from foundations. Right from the beginning, the rich administrative data provided by NCERDC provided the foundation for a highly productive and rewarding collaboration between me and two of my economics colleagues in the policy school, Charles Clotfelter and Jacob Vigdor. With funding from the Spencer Foundation and data from NCERDC, the team of Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor was off and running, first with a series of papers on the segregation of students within and across schools, followed by others on various aspects of teacher quality and teacher mobility. In subsequent years, additional funding from the Spencer Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation brought in other collaborators, including Ph.D. students and other faculty researchers, and opened opportunities for new research projects important to North Carolina, including research on community colleges and charter schools.

What is something people might not know about the NCERDC?

What we did not fully appreciate with the initial establishment of the NCERDC was how important a role it would play in the formation and ongoing operation of a national center for education research, known as CALDER – the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. In the early 2000s, North Carolina was one of only six states in which researchers could gain access to comprehensive administrative data. Researchers at Duke and five other universities (one in each of the other five states) were invited to collaborate with the Urban Institute in Washington D.C. to establish a new consortium to be funded by the National Institute of Education. I was the designated leader of the North Carolina effort and served as a member of the new consortium’s management team. Charles Clotfelter and Jacob Vigdor, as well as Ellizabeth Glennie in her capacity at the time as director of the NCERDC, were initial co-investigators of the North Carolina effort to design and execute studies for this new nationally-funded center.

Through its annual conferences, its publication of working papers, and interactions with policymakers and researchers throughout the country, CALDER has provided nationwide recognition for the NCERDC. Over time, the NCERDC has provided data for many Duke researchers and Ph.D. students, as well as many researchers from other universities.

Can you share a bit about a research project that you are particularly proud of?

Among the many research projects in which I have been involved, one stands out: our initial study of the North Carolina pre-school programs, Smart Start and NC Pre-K (originally called More at Four), published in 2014. This exciting project was a collaboration among three researchers within CCFP who represented three different disciplines:  an economist (me), a sociologist (Clara Muschkin), and a psychologist (Kenneth Dodge). We combined our various research perspectives to develop a quasi-experimental study that made use of disparities in funding across counties and over time for the state’s early childhood programs to determine how such investments translated into student achievement in reading and math once the students were in grade 3. This significant research paper was possible because the data center had recently acquired and matched data from detailed birth records to student records for all births occurring in North Carolina since 1987.

This first study, which focused on student outcomes in grade 3, was just the beginning of a series of published papers on North Carolina’s early childhood programs. In subsequent studies, we examined how such programs affected special education placements and student performance in grade 5 and grade 8. Those papers then led to a broader study that explored interactions between the early childhood programs and school characteristics.

There is little doubt that our studies have brought significant attention to North Carolina’s high-quality preschool program at a time when preschool is high on the policy agenda of many states.

What’s one way you’ve seen your research impact policy at a local, state, or federal level?

It is hard to identify specific impacts of my research, given that policy is the result of a complex process that involves multiple decision makers and competing values. My involvement on a number of commissions and task forces, however, is suggestive. In recent years, for example, at the state level, I was a member of Governor Cooper’s Leandro Commission on Access to Sound Basic Education (2017-2019).  At the federal level, I was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Financing of Early Care and Education with a Highly Qualified Workforce (2016-2018) and somewhat earlier (2008-2017), I was co-chair of the National Task Force on a Broader Bolder Approach to Education.

Can you share about a memorable international research trip you’ve taken, and what made it stand out?

I have been fortunate to spend extended periods during the past 25 years in four different countries writing books and papers on education policy with my husband, Edward (Ted) Fiske, a former education editor at the New York Times. The first of these adventures – six months in New Zealand in 1998 – was particularly memorable. With financing from a Fulbright Grant, we investigated New Zealand’s bold education reform effort in which they devolved operating authority to individual schools and introduced parental choice and competition among schools. The resulting book, When Schools Compete, A Cautionary Tale (2000) clearly benefitted from the combination of Ted’s reporting skills and my empirical skills. And the topic of school choice was then and has continued to be of great interest to policymakers in the U.S. and other countries.

As an aside, that first joint research project worked out so well that four years later we went to South Africa and wrote our second book:  Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002).

If you had to choose just one, what is a takeaway from your research that you would want to share?

A central takeaway from my research is the role that values play in the design of good education policy making. In 2018, I coauthored a book entitled Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision Making with two philosophers and another policy-oriented economist in which we emphasized that clear thinking about valued outcomes is essential for good education policy. That is, empirical studies by themselves should not drive policy. Instead, good policy is values driven and evidence informed.