Jean Grossman
Jean
Grossman
Senior Fellow, K-12 Education

Grossman joined MDRC in 2011 as a part-time senior fellow in the K-12 Education policy area. She is working on several projects related to youth education and employment. One project is studying how five workforce development systems are changing to serve young adults better by incorporating positive youth development practices, being employer driven, working together more effectively, and incorporating a race, equity, and inclusion lens into their work. Two other projects are focused on helping Job Corps build evidence to strengthen its program. Grossman also leads a project to write a series of practitioner-oriented briefs that present concrete actions school districts can take to improve the social-emotional well-being of their students in service of improving educational equity.

In addition to her position at MDRC, Grossman teaches courses on program evaluation and youth programs as a member of the faculty of Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Immediately prior to joining MDRC, Grossman served as chief evaluation officer for the U.S. Department of Labor, where she was responsible for developing and overseeing evaluations for all agencies in the department, including evaluations of training programs, the unemployment insurance program, worker-protection strategies, and worker-benefit programs. She has over two decades of experience developing and conducting both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of a wide variety of social programs—employment and training, health, welfare, dropout prevention, teen pregnancy prevention, education, and youth programs—including a dozen random assignment evaluations. Grossman is an economist who received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976 and her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.