Heather J. Hough

heather_hough
Heather J. Hough
Senior Policy and Research Fellow,
Policy Analysis for California Education, Stanford University

Heather Hough is a senior policy and research fellow and the former executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). Her research and analytic approach explores how a wide range of data on student outcomes—including academic, health and well-being, and experiential—can inform our collective understanding of student success, teacher and system performance, and the efficacy of programs and policies. She is committed to strengthening the impact of research on local- and state-level policymaking and implementation, with a particular focus on policy coherence, system alignment, and continuous improvement. Hough has worked in a variety of capacities to support policy and practice in education, including as the founding director of the research partnership between PACE and the CORE Districts; as an improvement advisor at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and as a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California, the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, and the Center for Education Policy at SRI International. She has served on many statewide committees and work groups, and is currently a member of the advisory board for the Cradle-to-Career Data System. Hough received her BA in public policy and her PhD in education policy from Stanford University.

updated 2024

Publications by Heather J. Hough
Evidence From the First Large-Scale Panel Student Survey
A growing number of school systems use self-report surveys to track students’ social-emotional development as a tool to inform policy and practice. In this article, the first large-scale panel survey of social-emotional learning (SEL) simulates how…
California’s CORE districts—a consortium of eight school districts serving a racially and socioeconomically diverse population of over one million students—since 2014 have led the way in deploying measures of social and emotional learning (SEL) and…
A Summary of the PACE Policy Research Panel
More than 725,000 of California’s K–12 students qualified for special education services in 2018–19, but they entered a system that is often ill-equipped to serve them. This brief summarizes the findings from the PACE Policy Research Panel on…
Views from the 2020 PACE/USC Rossier Poll
With important state and national elections looming, where do California voters stand on some of the major education policy issues of the day? This report examines findings from the 2020 PACE/USC Rossier Poll of California voters. The poll…