A surfeit of cool work has made it necessary to add another scholar to my edu-team at AEI. The new research fellow will become the fourth scholar on the AEI edu-team, joining Mark Schneider, Andrew Kelly, and yours truly. They’ll also have the opportunity to work with a program and research team that, I’m firmly convinced, is the most talented, most disciplined, smartest, hardest-working, and nicest in the nation. It’ll be a chance to work with a fantastic team on important questions, and to do so at a phenomenally supportive and intellectually vibrant institution. All in all, a pretty sweet gig for the right candidate.

The new hire won’t have to raise money or sit in committee meetings. What they will do is tackle a range of intriguing K-12 and higher ed projects, dealing with issues like entrepreneurship, higher ed productivity, philanthropy, mobilizing parents, higher ed transparency, the future of the teaching profession, ESEA reauth, technology, K-12 and higher ed leadership, career and technical education, Common Core implementation, citizenship, state- and district-level reform, and much else (the mix would be, in part, a matter of interest). The right candidate will be ready to take the reins on a handful of projects, collaborate on research and writing, pursue their own lines of inquiry, collect data, provide incisive editing, write for scholarly and more general audiences, and welcome the chance to become a public thinker and speaker.

We’re open to pre-docs, post-docs, junior faculty, or newish Ph.D.'s currently ensconced in some other setting. Are flexible on disciplinary and methodological background, though comfort with quantitative analysis is essential. The candidate needs to have sharp writing, analytic, editing, organizational, and interpersonal skills and should be a dynamic thinker willing to challenge convention and eager to pioneer new lines of research or analysis.

Now, as I think most RHSU readers know, my shop has certain biases, and any candidate ought to be moderately comfortable with those. What are they? That for-profits aren’t all bad, educators aren’t all angels, the ability to disagree civilly is a virtue, good intentions are no excuse for sloppy thinking, transparency is a virtue, jargon should not be mistaken for expertise, healthy markets are a powerful mechanism for channeling human ingenuity, and research rarely offers conclusive answers to the most important questions.

If this sounds like a good fit, or if you’ve got someone to recommend, I’d love to hear from you. Please contact us via the offices of my uber-competent research assistant Daniel Lautzenheiser at daniel.lautzenheiser@aei.org.