Dr. Wesley T. Morris is a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Research in Educational Policy (CREP) at the University of Memphis. He earned his Ph.D. in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the teacher labor market and how education policy shapes who becomes a teacher, where they work, how long they stay, and how they perform in the classroom. His work has examined teacher minimum salary reforms, federal financial aid for future teachers through the TEACH Grant, the effects of hiring teachers from the local community, teacher licensure and beginning teacher outcomes, and teachers' views of their evaluations. He has also published on online education and is beginning new work on school choice and rural education.
Working in the economics of education, Dr. Morris uses quasi-experimental methods and large-scale state administrative data to produce evidence for policymakers and practitioners. His work has appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and AERA Open, and has been featured by the Brookings Institution, the National Council on Teacher Quality, and FutureEd. Before joining CREP, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. At CREP, he contributes to evaluations such as SAMHSA's Project AWARE with University Schools. He looks forward to bringing the knowledge generated by CREP's evaluations into the broader policy conversation, building on his commitment to working closely with policymakers and practitioners so that evidence is informed by their experience and useful for the decisions they face.
Education:
Ph.D. in Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2025
M.P.P. in Education Policy, Vanderbilt University, 2020
B.S. in Mathematics, Wake Forest University, 2016