Jonathan Schweig

Biography

Jonathan D. Schweig is a Senior Behavioral and Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation and a core faculty member at the RAND School of Public Policy. He was previously Program Director at Math for America in New York City and, earlier in his career, taught mathematics in grades 5–12. Dr. Schweig earned his A.B. from Brown University, his M.A. from Stanford University, and his M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Schweig studies how educational policies, instructional systems, and organizational conditions shape teaching, learning, and opportunity in schools. His research brings together education policy, educational measurement, and quantitative methodology to examine how policies are interpreted and enacted, how they influence school climate and participation, and how they contribute to or mitigate educational inequality. Across this work, he is especially interested in the use of evidence to understand implementation, student experiences, and opportunity to learn.

For more than a decade, Dr. Schweig has conducted research in partnership with school districts, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations on issues including student perceptions of learning environments, exclusionary discipline, and access to advanced coursework. His work combines methodological rigor with close attention to the realities of educational practice and to the ways data are generated, interpreted, and used in decision-making contexts.

Dr. Schweig’s scholarship has been recognized with the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation award from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, as well as RAND Spotlight Awards for Mentorship and Quality Assurance. His work has appeared in leading journals including Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, and Psychological Methods. He serves on the editorial boards of Educational Researcher and Educational Assessment and has served since 2019 on California’s Technical Design Group, advising the California Department of Education on statewide accountability policy.

Selected Publications

Schweig, J. D., Kaufman, J. H., & Opfer, V. D. (2020). Day by day: Investigating variation in elementary mathematics instruction that supports the Common Core. Educational Researcher, 49(3), 176–187. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X20909812

Doan, S., Schweig, J. D., & Mihaly, K. (2019). The consistency of composite ratings of teacher effective- ness: Evidence from New Mexico. American Educational Research Journal, 56(6), 2116–2146. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1234674.pdf

Schweig, J. D., Martínez, J. F., & Hoskins, J. (2022). Making sense of consensus: Exploring how class- room climate surveys can support instructional improvement efforts in science. American Journal of Education, 128(4), 557–590. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720539