Alyn Turner

About Alyn Turner

Dr. Alyn Turner is an experienced sociologist who brings her passion for equitable education to address program- and policy-relevant issues in early childhood and K-12 education. Turner specializes in designing and conducting mixed-methods evaluations and research studies to document the effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability of interventions to improve educational outcomes and advance a just education system. She currently serves as the Senior Research Director of RFA’s Impact Team, where she oversees a team of ten researchers and provides strategic oversight and direction for a multitude of evaluation projects and research studies.

Since joining RFA in 2017, Turner has led a range of research efforts, including directing the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, a long-standing research-practice-partnership- with the School District of Philadelphia. Turner also recently served as a Principal Investigator on a five-year Education and Innovation Research grant awarded to the Children’s Literacy Initiative to develop and evaluate a comprehensive preschool curriculum and professional development program for pre-K teachers.

Additional achievements include providing technical support and research expertise to Pennsylvania’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning for advancing systems-level initiatives to improve early child care and education quality throughout the commonwealth of Pennsylvania; a mixed-methods study of the Head Start workforce in Detroit; and a multi-year descriptive study of early reading outcomes in more than 35 New York City public schools participating in Teaching Matters’ Early Reading Matters program.

Before joining RFA, Turner was a research scholar at the Center for Women’s Health and Health Disparities Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Turner holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and an M.S. in Population Health Sciences from the same institution.