An Interview with EA Board Member, Monica Bhatt

Monica Bhatt, Senior Research Director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab, joined EA’s Board of Directors in 2024. At a recent EA staff meeting, CEO Andrew Rice interviewed her. Below are highlights from their conversation.  

A Conversation with Board Member Monica Bhatt 

Andrew Rice: To start, tell us a little about yourself: what do you do day to day, and what drew you to serve on EA’s board? 

Monica Bhatt: I’m an applied social policy researcher at the University of Chicago’s Education Lab and Crime Lab, where I’ve worked for about a decade. My training and focus is education policy research, though I’ve also worked on adolescent mental health and gun-violence prevention. I now have school-age children, and I am experiencing school from a parent perspective, which is eye-opening. 

I was drawn to EA because I’ve always loved applied policy research—combining scientific methods with real-world policy. EA represents the future of that work: building data infrastructure that can actually improve outcomes. During the past two years on the board, I’ve also come to really appreciate EA’s team and culture—both in Madison and across the country.

AR: Looking ahead, how should the role of research in education evolve, and how do you want it to evolve? 

MB: Since the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) launched in the early 2000s, the field built a strong bench of credible causal studies. That’s progress, but it hasn’t fully transformed practice. The next step is marrying causal inference with data science and machine learning—and tying research much more tightly to implementation in real time. Findings have been too lagged and too detached from practice. EA can lead here: Apply modern methods to large-scale data and deliver timely, practice-moving insights without abandoning rigor. 

AR: What challenges do you see? 

MB: Some questions in education are fundamentally about values: what we want schools to do and why. Data can inform, but communities must set the goals. That’s an area where research plays a limited role.

AR: How do we respond to critiques about context and evidence? 

MB: In my recent experience in gun-violence prevention, debates often flatten complexity into binaries, like either participatory research or randomized trials are “real” research. Our job is to resist that. We instead need to name the dimensions that matter and build approaches that are rigorous and participatory where appropriate. We should reject these dichotomies and define “good science” by combining strengths across methods.  
 
Also, academia helped create this reaction by being exclusionary for too long. We need humility and inclusion without abandoning standards. If we care about outcomes for kids, these fights should move us toward better science, not away from it. 

AR: Five years from now, what do you hope EA has accomplished? 

MB: Two big things: 

• Solidify and expand the data infrastructure footprint. Investigate what’s working in current states and share that knowledge with more states. The Ed-Tech Collaboratory  provides examples of how the states working together positively impacts students.  
• Demonstrate a clear use case where infrastructure measurably improves student outcomes. It doesn’t have to be statewide. Even one district or content area is fine! But it has to be concrete and attributable to the infrastructure. The policy window won’t stay open forever; we need visible impact in that timeframe. 

AR: Any final thoughts? 

MB: I love large-scale randomized controlled trials and econometrics, but I also know that a powerful documentary that reaches the same conclusion can move people to action in ways a peer-reviewed journal cannot. A healthy evidence ecosystem uses all kinds of methodologies to surface and confirm hypotheses—qualitative and quantitative—as well as robust dissemination and engagement pathways for that evidence to ensure evidence is used appropriately. That’s what we should aspire to.