Dillon G. McGill

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University and a research affiliate with the Research Alliance for New York City Schools and the Tennessee Education Research Alliance.  My quantitative and mixed-methods research supports district leadership teams answer policy-relevant questions about the impact of their decisions on students and schools. Research questions direct the methodologies I apply to this work and have included quasi-experimental design, multi-level modeling, network analysis, and survey and interview data collection. 

My current projects, supported by an AERA/NSF Dissertation Grant Award, help the New York City Public School system understand how family preferences for specific high schools structure enrollment pressures across the district by leveraging student application data and a unique survey of high school principals. In another strand of my work, I have partnered with a large school district in the Southeastern U.S. to examine the equity implications of its funding system for schools serving marginalized student populations.

Prior to graduate school, I taught high school English in the west valley of Phoenix, coached and trained charter and district teachers and leaders with the Arizona Charter Schools Association, and managed Teach For America's K-12 leadership development and alumni strategy in the Phoenix region.