Jason Snipes oversees the Council of the Great City Schools’ program of research and dissemination aimed at tracking core student achievement outcomes and arming the nation’s largest urban school districts with research based strategies for addressing their core educational challenges, improving academic achievement, and reducing achievement gaps. Since arriving at the Council, Snipes has worked with the Institute for Education Sciences to establish a senior fellowship program in urban education research. The program is designed to encourage collaboration between high caliber researchers and leaders in urban school districts in order to produce high quality, policy relevant research that addresses the primary challenges facing urban school districts. His work at the Council also includes a series of (forthcoming) research briefs on the primary challenges facing urban school districts in secondary school reform.

Prior to joining the Council, Snipes was deputy director of K–12 education research at MDRC, where he played a key role on a number of major research projects in education, including the national evaluations of Career Academies and Project GRAD. He also led the development of the research design for several U.S. Department of Education-sponsored studies, including random assignment studies of teacher professional development strategies in reading and mathematics. While at MDRC, he was also co-principal investigator and lead author of Foundations for Success, an influential set of case studies examining the policies and practices driving improved achievement in large urban school districts. Snipes holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Stanford University. He received his masters and doctorate degrees in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.