Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca Johnson

Assistant Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy

Georgetown University

Biography

Welcome to my site! I’m an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where I teach data science in the MS in Data Science for Public Policy and am affiliated with the Massive Data Institute and Department of Sociology. I’m also a 2020-2021 Access to Justice Faculty Scholar with the American Bar Foundation, an academic affiliate with the federal Office of Evaluation Sciences, and a visiting Data Science Fellow with The Lab at DC.

My research studies how social service bureaucracies use a mix of data and discretion to decide who deserves help and focuses particularly on prioritization in K-12 schools. Substantively, I study how underfunded K-12 districts navigate three forces: legal mandates about categories of students to prioritize, fiscal realities, and family advocacy. Methodologically, I use a variety of methods, including tools from causal inference, computational text analysis, machine learning, interviews, and field experiments with large-scale administrative data. Other research focuses on prioritization in other areas of social policy, including rental housing, COVID-19 relief, and civil rights enforcement.

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