ABout Rachel Durham
Rachel Durham
Research Scientist, BERC
Johns Hopkins University
Rachel Durham, Ph.D. is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools and with the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC), a partnership of the Baltimore City Public Schools, Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, and others. She received her doctorate in sociology and demography from Pennsylvania State University (2007). She is conducting research focusing on issues of “keeping kids on track” during the elementary grades, successful transition to middle school, and dropout prevention in high school. With other community researchers, she is developing protocols for merging school and student-level information with data from neighborhood and community-level sources to discover relationships between urban social and economic factors and student achievement. She has published articles in Social Stratification and Mobility and Rural Sociology. Much of her research has been focused on the educational achievement of immigrant students, early literacy acquisition, and school readiness.