JoAnn Hsueh

JoAnn Hsueh is the director of MDRC’s Family Well-Being and Children’s Development policy area, bringing expertise in the development of young children, early childhood education, and advanced quantitative methods and measurement for estimating impacts of education and social policies on children and families with racial, ethnic, linguistic diversity and who experience poverty. Her research has focused on strengthening evidence-based policy and practice in the areas of early care and education, Early Head Start, Head Start, and preschool programming; two-generational approaches with the dual focus of enhancing children’s outcomes and parental employment, education, and economic self-sufficiency outcomes; family-focused and parenting interventions aimed at strengthening the nature of interactions among mothers, fathers, and their children; and employment-based and antipoverty programming.

Hsueh is currently the principal investigator and project director of the ExCEL and VIQI projects, which are large-scale, rigorous studies that aim to build causal evidence of the effects of different features of quality and teacher practices on child outcomes across Head Start and community-based early care and education settings serving 3- and 4-year-old children. She is the principal investigator of the Institute for Education Sciences Early Learning Network study of the Boston Public Schools’ policies and programming and how children’s learning environments support school success during pre-K and early elementary school years. The study focuses on children’s experiences in the classrooms, at home, after school, and over the summer that may promote or inhibit academic success by third grade. Hsueh is also a principal investigator of the Building, Advancing, and Sustaining the Early Care and Education Workforce (BASE) Project, which aims to identify and test strategies currently underway nationally that can effectively enhance retention, reduce turnover, and build a pipeline for the early care and education workforce.

Hsueh leads MDRC’s Equity & Culturally Responsive Collaborative, which aims to advance the integration of equity-based and culturally-responsive practices in the organization’s research and technical assistance efforts. She sits on the editorial board and the ad hoc committee on racial equity in publishing for Early Childhood Research Quarterly and on the selection advisory committee for the Foundation for Child Development’s Young Scholars program. She has published numerous reports, book chapters, and journal articles, presented her work to interdisciplinary audiences, and developed strong collaborative relationships with multiple stakeholders, policymakers, practitioners, and funders across the preschool and early care and education landscape. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in community psychology with an emphasis in developmental science and quantitative methods from New York University.