Dr. Susan J Bodilly

Director and Senior Social Scientist of RAND Education


United States of America

Susan Bodilly, PhD in Public Policy, has worked at RAND for more than 29 years. Her primary research interests and expertise lie in: K-12 school reform; resource allocation and its impact on reforms; formative evaluation; and implementation analysis. She has evaluated an array of K-12 improvement initiatives such as: the General Electric College Bound program; attempts by high schools to integrate academic and vocational education; attempts by the federal government to return Section Six schools on military bases to local control; and attempts by schools to implement Perkins legislation as evaluated under the National Assessment of Vocational Education. She played a leading role in the RAND evaluation of the New American Schools Initiative.

She has managed review panels for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She co-edited a book on scale up issues in education and published an extensive literature review on the use of out-of-school-time. Her latest report analytically describes collaborative systems intended to support high quality arts education experiences in six different cities. She is now leading an evaluation of the Ford Foundation’s Collaborating for Educational Reform Initiative and an examination of five cities’ attempts to improve out –of-school-time programming. She has held management positions at RAND for the past ten years; she is currently the Director of RAND Education.