Sarah J. Archibald

Sarah Archibald is a school finance researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She has a PhD in educational leadership in policy analysis (ELPA) from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently holds an appointment as a lecturer in the ELPA department. Her career at the University of Wisconsin began as an undergraduate in political science; she received her BA in 1993. Next, she received a master's degree in policy analysis from the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs in 1998, and shortly thereafter became a researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at UW-Madison (CPRE). During the past ten years at CPRE, she has studied and assisted in district- and school-level reform, district- and school-level resource reallocation, educational adequacy, professional development, teacher compensation, and most recently, the strategic management of human capital. She helped develop two frameworks for collecting micro-level data, both published in the Journal of Education Finance: a school-level expenditure structure, and a framework for capturing professional development costs at the district and school level. She is the coauthor of the previous edition of Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Asking For More, and the author or coauthor of numerous articles on these subjects. Archibald's passion is participating in research that informs policy. Among other projects, she is now a researcher with IRIS (Integrated Resource Information System), a project funded by IES (Institute of Education Sciences). The goal of IRIS is to help Milwaukee Public Schools create a system for tracking resource data down to the school level so that district leaders can answer questions about what works and use district resources strategically to support higher levels of achievement for urban schoolchildren.