Nora Gordon
Distinguished Professor
Nora Gordon is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a founding co-leader of the Maryland - Washington, D.C. chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. She serves on the FutureEd Advisory Board, as a research advisor to the DC Policy Center's Education Policy Initiative, and on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy and the Journal of Human Resources.
Dr. Gordon and Carrie Conaway are the authors of Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leader's Guide to Using Data and Research. Dr. Gordon conducts research on American elementary and secondary education policy, with an emphasis on the federal role in school finance. She has studied the distributional impacts of Title I, fiscal rules governing federal education grants, the Community Eligibility Provision, state school finance reforms, causes and consequences of school desegregation, and school district consolidation. Her research has been published in journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation for Education Research, the American Educational Research Association, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Her popular writing appears in outlets including the New York Times, Education Week, and TheAtlantic.com.
Dr. Gordon has testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and as an expert on federal education funding to school districts in U.S. district court. She has served on the Institute of Education Sciences Expert Panel on the Study of the Title I Formula, DC’s state Title I Committee of Practitioners, and on the Professional Advisory Board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College.