Diane Schanzenbach, associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, will give a lecture titled "School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement" at noon Friday, Sept. 23 on the University of Arkansas campus.

The lecture is part of the Department of Education Reform lecture series. It will be in Room 309 of the Graduate Education Building. RSVP online for lunch on the lecture website. Deadline to RSVP is 1 p.m. the Wednesday before the lecture. Some of Schanzenbach's academic papers are linked at the lecture website.

She is a faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is also a research consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Schanzenbach studies policies aimed at improving the lives of children in poverty, including education, health, and income support policies. Her recent work has focused on tracing the impact of major public policies such as the food stamp program and early childhood education on children's long-term outcomes.

Her recent paper with Susan Dynarski and Joshua Hyman on the impact of small classes in the early grades on college enrollment and completion won the Raymond Vernon Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2013.

Her research has received financial support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation, and has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Public Economics, among other outlets.