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
A Progress Report One Year After Getting Down to Facts II
The Getting Down to Facts II (GDTFII) project, released in September 2018, assessed the state of preK–12 education in California. As year 2 of Governor Newsom’s term begins, this report provides a progress update on three areas of concern raised by…
This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in…
Findings From the First Large-Scale Panel Survey of Students
Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools for assessing the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures use standardized tests as the outcome of interest, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the…
Insights from Outlier Schools
There is a growing consensus in education that schools can and should attend to students’ social-emotional development. Emerging research and popular texts indicate that students’ mindsets, beliefs, dispositions, emotions, and behaviors can advance…