Jessica Drescher

Bio

Jessica Drescher is a doctoral candidate in education policy at Stanford University and a Health Policy Research Scholar at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She received her M.Ed. in education policy and management at Harvard University and her B.A. in sociology at Colby College. Prior to Stanford, she spent several years working at Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab, where she focused on the role of city government in addressing the iron-law correlation between socioeconomic status and education outcomes.

Shaped by her experiences as an unaccompanied homeless youth and first-generation college student, Jessica researches education as a lever of social mobility and explores the potential of big data to inform social policy. Her current projects are focused on examining the relationship between ecological health factors and academic achievement, with a particular focus on the opioid crisis.