Two new faculty members – Matthew Springer and Ayesha Hashim – are joining the School of Education’s faculty in educational policy, organization, and leadership.
Spring and Hashim will join UNC-Chapel Hill in positions starting in fall 2018. They are two of six new faculty members recruited to join the School of Education this year.
“I am delighted that Drs. Springer and Hashim will be joining us, said Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, dean of the School of Education. With their appointments, they join a faculty with expertise in education policy, organization, and leadership working to prepare educational leaders and policy experts, and to develop research-practitioner partnerships with state and district agencies focused on research translation, information use, and improvement science.”
Matthew Springer joins the School of Education as associate professor and the Robena and Walter E. Hussman Jr. Distinguished Professor in Education Reform. He comes to Carolina from the Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.
Springer has published widely in educational research journals and books, with a research agenda that has focused on the impacts of incentive pay programs, accountability policies, and educator evaluation systems on the teacher workforce and on student achievement. He is also working to understand why short-term boosts in measured outcomes from early childhood programs often diminish soon after the program ends.
Springer has secured approximately $35 million in externally funded research and has published extensively in top journals in education, policy studies, and quantitative methods. He has extensive experience partnering with policymakers and practitioners at the state and district levels.
Springer earned a Ph.D. in education finance and policy from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, and a B.A. in education and psychology with honors from Denison University in Ohio. Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University, Springer was a teacher and administrator at a boarding school in New York state.
He served as principal investigator for the Project on Incentives in Teaching experiment in Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, the Team Performance Incentives experiment in Round Rock, Texas, and as director of the Tennessee Consortium on Research, Evaluation, and Development. He has also served on several advisory committees charged with designing performance-based compensation systems for teachers and/or principals at the state and district level, has testified widely on performance-pay and educator evaluation policies and has conducted analyses of school finance systems in several states.
Ayesha Hashim joins the School of Education as an assistant professor. She comes to Carolina from a postdoctoral fellowship in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where she has managed a Spencer Foundation-funded mixed methods study in partner school districts across three cities: New Orleans, Denver, and Los Angeles.
Hashim conducts research on the implementation and impacts of school district policies and reforms, with a particular focus on instructional technology and social networks in schools. She completed her Ph.D. in urban education policy at the University of Southern California in May 2017, and also holds master’s degrees in public policy and economics from USC.
Hashim won the 2017 New Scholar Award for her dissertation from the Association of Education Finance and Policy. The dissertation explored the challenges faced by teachers and “ed-tech” coaches who were rolling out adoption of new technology devices in classrooms.
Hashim, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and politics from Scripps College, also serves on the board of a philanthropic organization in India that supports community-based programs for improving educational opportunities for low-income youth.