Chalkbeat May 22, 2025
It ends up being a very quiet and sneaky way to fund a voucher program and impose it on states because it’s just wrapped up in this gargantuan and confusing tax bill…
Jon Valant is the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, where he holds the Herman and George R. Brown Chair in education studies. Valant is a researcher who specializes in K-12 education policy and politics in the United States. Much of his work examines inequities in education and the policies that mitigate or exacerbate those inequities.
Valant’s research explores a variety of subjects, including school choice, partisan politics, education reform, and the barriers that keep families from accessing opportunities. He conducts some of his work—on topics such as charter schools and student discipline—through research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in Louisiana and Washington, D.C. At Brookings, Valant is an editor of the Brown Center Chalkboard blog, which exists to improve the information available to decision-makers in education.
Valant’s research has been published in a wide variety of academic and nonacademic outlets. Since coming to Brookings, he has served on the board of directors of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, served on the editorial boards of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Educational Researcher, and taught a graduate-level education policy course at Stanford University. Valant’s research and commentary appears regularly in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, PBS, NPR, and Education Week.
Valant holds a Ph.D. in educational policy and a master’s degree in political science from Stanford University, a master’s in public policy from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and political science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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Current Positions
- Director, Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings
- Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings
- Herman and George R. Brown Chair in Education Studies
- Research Fellow at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans
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Education
- Ph.D. Education, Stanford University
- M.A. Political Science, Stanford University
- M.P.P. Public Policy, Harvard University
- B.A. Political Science & Philosophy, University of Michigan