Grossman joined MDRC in 2011 as a part-time senior fellow in the K-12 Education policy area. She works on several projects related to youth education and employment. She leads one project that is focused on helping Job Corps build evidence to strengthen its program by suggesting a potential research agenda to strengthen and evaluate the program and by conducting an implementation and outcome study of two current Job Corps pilot programs. Another project she helps lead is the Personalized Learning Initiative, a large-scale evaluation of tutoring. This initiative aims to determine how to target tutoring and other related personalized learning interventions to serve as many students who need help as possible in a cost-effective manner.
In addition to her position at MDRC, Grossman teaches courses on program evaluation and youth programs as a member of the faculty of Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Immediately before joining MDRC, Grossman served as chief evaluation officer for the U.S. Department of Labor, where she was responsible for developing and overseeing evaluations for all agencies in the department, including evaluations of training programs, the unemployment insurance program, worker-protection strategies, and worker-benefit programs. She has over two decades of experience developing and conducting both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of a wide variety of social programs—employment and training, health, welfare, dropout prevention, teen pregnancy prevention, education, and youth programs—including a dozen random assignment evaluations. Grossman is an economist who received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976 and her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.
