C.J. Park

Principal Education Researcher, SRI Education

CJ Park has decades of experience studying efforts to improve teaching quality and to support students’ success in high school and beyond. She leads large-scale, mixed-methods evaluation projects that integrate implementation and causal impact research, and supports practitioners use of research to inform practice. Her methodological expertise includes evaluation design, survey development and analysis, qualitative data collection and analysis. She is skilled at integrating qualitative and quantitative data to document implementation progress, including implementation metric design to inform and contextualize impact study findings.  

At SRI, Park’s work in college and career readiness examines how education policies and programs improve the academic and life outcomes of children and young adults. For example, Park leads an evaluation of the implementation and impact of the Career Connected Pathways Project, an initiative aimed at increasing Arizona high school students’ access to quality career pathways in cybersecurity and computer science. She evaluated an effort to expand and improve career pathways in health care for students in Oakland Unified School District in California. Park led the evaluation of Skills for Secondary School Success, which aims to support middle school students in developing the non-academic skills—such as self-management, goal orientation, and self-efficacy—they need for high school. Finally, as co-lead of the Improving Postsecondary Transitions Partnership for the Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia, she provided educators in rural eastern Kentucky with research-based technical assistance on nonacademic strategies to support postsecondary transitions.  

Park has also led several studies of K–12 professional learning efforts. She currently leads a study of the Urban District Literacy Collaborative to understand how improved systems alignment, high quality professional learning, and high quality instructional materials (HQIM) can support instruction and student learning. She led multiple mixed-methods studies of the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program, an approach to supporting teachers with teaching complex, source-based argument writing that integrates high-quality instructional materials, analysis of student work, and practice-focused professional learning. She also conducted a study of a K–3 district wide early literacy and numeracy effort in a large urban district and an evaluation of a job-embedded master’s program focused on early learning and collaborative inquiry practices.  

Park holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree in economics and sociology from Rutgers University. 

Key projects

• National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program
• Evaluation of the Career Connected Pathways Project
• Evaluation of Skills for Secondary Success
• Oakland Health Career Pathways Project
• California’s Linked Learning District Initiative