Eric Hanushek
Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow in Education

Expertise: Economics of education; applied public finance and public policy analysis, with special emphasis on education issues

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Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. Since 2005, he has been on the state's Governor's Advisory Committee on Education Excellence and is also a member of the National Board for Education Sciences.

He is a leading expert on educational policy, specializing in the economics and finance of schools. His on-going research spans a number of the most important and controversial areas of education policy including the impacts of high stakes accountability and of class size reduction and the importance of teacher quality. These analyses, combined with his work on efficiency and resource usage, relate directly to current debates about school finance policy and the concepts of adequacy and equity as they have been applied in litigation. Analyses of growth and the economic impact of school outcomes provide an economic rationale for improving school quality and for promoting more efficient use of school resources.

Hanushek is the 2004 recipient of the Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship. He is a member of the International Academy of Education, the National Academy of Education, and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists.

His books include Courting Failure: How School Finance Lawsuits Exploit Judges' Good Intentions and Harm Our Children, The Economics of Schooling and School Quality, Improving America's Schools, Making Schools Work, Educational Performance of the Poor, Education and Race, Assessing Policies for Retirement Income, Modern Political Economy, Improving Information for Social Policy Decisions, and Statistical Methods for Social Scientists, along with numerous articles in professional journals.

He previously held academic appointments at the University of Rochester, Yale University, and the U.S. Air Force Academy. Government service includes being Deputy Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, and Senior Economist at the Cost of Living Council.

Hanushek is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1965–1974.