Katharine Destler

Kate Destler is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in public policy and management in the Evans School working under Associate Professor Stephen Page. A former school teacher, her research focuses on education policy, organizational culture/leadership, and the politics of performance management reform. During the spring and summer of 2010, she served as a senior research analyst for the Seattle Public Schools as it negotiated a new contract with the Seattle Education Association. Destler has presented previous work at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM), the Western Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Destler is interested broadly in how norms and beliefs shape the policy process–both prior to and following the enactment of large-scale reform. Her dissertation focuses on the role of culture–norms, values and perceptions–in the implementation of performance management education reform. She studies the impact of performance management reforms in the New York City school system, and examines the conditions under which the adoption of performance values is most likely to occur. Other areas of interest include policy diffusion, the politics of administrative and education reform, labor-management relations, charter schools/collaborative governance, and the decision-making of teachers and other street-level bureaucrats. An article comparing teacher compensation structures in public and private schools, co-authored with Dan Goldhaber and Daniel Player, was published January 2010 in the Economics of Education Review.