Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj is a Professor of Education Policy in the Policy, Program Evaluation, and Research Methods program in the Department of Education. Her research focuses on the implications of education policy design and implementation for immigrant-origin students' educational access and opportunities.
Carolyn uses qualitative interviewing, ethnographic, and mixed-methods approaches to explore immigrant-origin students' and families’ experiences negotiating educational institutions and policies and to understand the contexts in which they are educated. Her work includes studies of immigrant families’ school choice behaviors; experimental research to improve access to school choice information; analyses of impacts of immigration enforcement on students’ academic performance, school attendance, and social-emotional wellbeing; investigations of the ways pre-service teacher education engages migration as a topic of study; and school-based ethnographic work focused on schools’ and districts’ approaches to educating recently arrived immigrant students.
Carolyn earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in International Education from New York University. Prior to earning her doctorate, she worked on secondary school reform at the New York City Department of Education. Carolyn was the inaugural Research Fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney (2018-2019), founding co-Chair of the Association for Education, Finance & Policy's Qualitative Policy Scholars Community Group (2023), and Program co-Chair for AERA's Division L Education Policy & Politics (2022, 2023). She was named Outstanding Reviewer by the American Educational Research Journal (2022) and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (2018), and she currently serves as an Associate Editor of Education, Finance & Policy.