Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf is an eminent scholar of school choice. He began his academic career at Harvard University as a graduate student in political science. At the time, the politics of education emerged as a major subfield within political science when scholars began studying the political economy of primary and secondary school systems in earnest and argued that school choice policies would be a promising approach to school reform. However, no rigorous empirical evidence existed to substantiate these claims. Wolf filled this research gap by using randomized control trials to evaluate private-school choice programs. In doing so, he not only offered the earliest pieces of empirical evidence to speak to theories about school choice but also produced them using the most rigorous empirical methods then available. Wolf has spent his scholarly career studying school choice policy, directly influencing policy and building the foundation for much of the contemporary research on school choice.