Howard S. Bloom

Since 1999, Dr. Bloom has led MDRC’s development and application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods for estimating program impacts, with an emphasis on using these methods to improve evaluations of educational interventions. Before coming to MDRC, Dr. Bloom spent 21 years teaching research methods, program evaluation, and applied statistics to a generation of graduate students in public policy and management at Harvard University and at New York University, where in 1993 he received the university-wide Great Teacher Award. The author of numerous articles and several books, Dr. Bloom has been a principal investigator of many randomized experiments and rigorous quasi-experiments in education, human development and labor market research, and in 2010 he received the Peter H. Rossi Award for Contributions to the Theory or Practice of Program Evaluation from the Association for Public Policy and Management. Also, in 2019 he was elected to the National Academy of Education. In addition, Dr. Bloom: (1) led the Bloom, Riccio, Hill (2003) study of predictors of cross-site variation in work-welfare program impacts, which received the 2003 Outstanding Article Award from the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2) led the Bloom et al. (2017) study of methods for quantifying cross-site impact variation, which received the 2017 Outstanding Article Award from the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and (3) led a team of well-known methodologists from academia and the contract research community in a Spencer Foundation project on developing, testing and applying methods for studying cross-site impact variation.