Overview
Nell Williams is a postdoctoral research associate working on a research project investigating the decision-making and budgeting priorities of North Carolina school districts in allocating their $5.6 billion dollars in federal COVID-19 relief money. The project, with Ethan Hutt, Thad Domina, and Matt Springer and funded by the North Carolina Collaboratory, will provide important information about the way school districts responded to the challenges of the pandemic and the effectiveness of these approaches. Nell has built expertise on issues of equitable school finance and resource allocation through her dissertation research, a detailed analysis of school funding allocations in New York City; her work on school finance equity across schools, districts, and states published in the Peabody Journal of Education’s special issue on school-level education finance; and her experience working for an ed tech company specializing in district finance and budgeting. Nell is a former middle school science teacher and recently graduated from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.