Christine Mokher, Ph.D.

Christine Mokher, Ph.D. has been a research scientist for the Education division at CNA since 2008. Her research expertise is in college- and career-readiness and student transitions from secondary to postsecondary education. She is the principal investigator for a five-year IES grant to evaluate Florida’s College and Career Readiness Initiative. She also currently serves as the Associate Project Director and Summative Evaluation Team Lead for a program evaluation of the Northeast Tennessee College and Career Ready Consortium, which is funded by an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the United States Department of Education.

Mokher has worked extensively with a large-scale, longitudinal database of student-level records from the state of Florida’s K-20 Data Warehouse on projects for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the United States Department of Education’s National Assessment of Career & Technical Education. These studies examined outcomes related to high school course taking, post-high school transitions, college course taking, attainment of postsecondary credentials, and post-school employment and earnings.

Her work for the Regional Educational Laboratory-Appalachia (REL-A) includes research for a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of hybrid Algebra I program. She is also serving as a Co-Principal Investigator for fast-response studies on 1) the alignment between high school career and technical education and high-wage and high-demand occupations in Tennessee, 2) participation rates in supplemental services in the Appalachian region, and 3) college enrollment patterns of Virginia high school graduates.

Mokher’s research also investigates issues of teacher quality and effectiveness. She is a Co-Investigator on a study for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards that examines the relationship between teacher’s participation in the National Board certification process and changes in observed classroom practices. She is also a researcher for an empirical analysis of student achievement and teacher effectiveness for the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center on Performance Incentives.

Prior to joining CNA, Mokher worked as a research assistant for Vanderbilt's Higher Education Leadership and Policy program and the National Center for School Choice. She has also served as a presidential fellow in institutional research at Harvard University and as an institutional research analyst at MIT. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles in the American Journal of Education, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Education Finance, Research in Higher Education, and The Journal of Higher Education. She has also co-authored a book chapter for the Johns Hopkins University Press and presented her research at conferences of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, American Educational Research Association, Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, American Education Finance Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education. She was also selected as a finalist for the Outstanding Dissertation Award by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Politics of Education Association.

Education

• Ph.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 2008
• Ed.M. Administration, Planning, and Social Policy, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 2004
• B.B.A. Marketing and International Business, Baylor University, Waco, TX 2000