Kaylee Matheny
Postdoctoral Fellow
Kaylee Matheny joined PIRL as a postdoctoral fellow after receiving her PhD in Sociology of Education and Education Policy from Stanford University. She uses quantitative descriptive, quasi-experimental, and qualitative methods to examine socioeconomic inequality in education. She conducts three strands of work: evaluating equitable policies and practices, understanding people’s educational experiences as classed, and analyzing how socioeconomic status intersections with other social identities. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in outlets such as American Sociological Review, American Educational Research Journal, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Academic background:
Matheny holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and English-Creative Writing from Emory University and a master’s degree in Sociology from Stanford University. Prior to graduate school, Matheny was a 10th grade English teacher and content lead at her high school alma mater. Matheny’s dissertation, Socioeconomic Inequality in Education Across the Life Course, explores how and why socioeconomic inequality persists in educational settings. Her work is driven by her own experiences as a low-income, first-gen high school graduate, as well as the experiences of her family, her 10th graders, and her former schoolmates in her hometown of Griffin, GA. She loves collecting books (and occasionally reading them), playing board games, binging comedy series, and making new recipes.
Research interests: socioeconomic status, education, family, mixed methods, policy