Sheila Nataraj Kirby is a Senior Fellow in the Education and Child Development Studies department at NORC. She joined NORC in April 2011. In this role, she works with the senior management team to shape NORC's education portfolio, to provide quality assurance, and to help disseminate NORC's research results to policy makers and other researchers. Over the past three years, she has also undertaken a comprehensive analysis of completion and attrition in doctoral education and is currently co-leading a pilot study on master's education for the Sloan Foundation.
Kirby has 35 years of experience leading multidisciplinary teams in education and military manpower research and is widely regarded as an authority in teacher education and teacher labor markets, policy evaluation, and defense policy. She has led a number of important, large-scale studies for the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Defense, major foundations, and, most recently, the New York City Department of Education. She is well-versed in both rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methods and her work has involved both original data collection through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, as well as analyses of large secondary databases. Her education work has included analyses of teacher education reform, teacher supply and demand, comprehensive school reform, and school choice. In 2010, she completed a congressionally mandated study of diversity and representation among military service academy entrants and graduates.
Kirby was a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, where she worked for 33 years and served in various senior positions, including acting and associate director of the RAND Washington office and associate director of quality assurance for the RAND Education unit. In that role, she developed and implemented a rigorous quality assurance process for RAND Education publications, and worked on dissemination activities including writing policy briefs for members of Congress, state policy makers, and researchers. She has published extensively in the areas of education and military manpower and is the author and co-author of several RAND monographs, research briefs, and journal articles on these subjects.
Kirby is affiliated with The George Washington University, where she taught graduate courses for more than 25 years as an adjunct full professor of economics and public policy. She is also a senior scholar at the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering graduate education.