TJ D'Agostino
Associate Professor of the Practice
- Office
- Hesburgh Center for International Studies
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - adagosti@nd.edu
Expertise
Comparative education policy; educational development; literacy; multilingual education; implementation research; political economy; education and inequality; faith-based institutions and education
Biography & Research
TJ D’Agostino is an associate professor of the practice in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated facullty member of the Pulte Institute for Global Development. He is also a fellow of the Kellogg Institute and the Institute for Educational Initiatives.
D’Agostino’s scholarship focuses on comparative education policy and an examination of systems and institutions and their role in improving educational outcomes for vulnerable children in low- and middle-income contexts. His scholarship and policy and practice engagement focus on the role and contributions of faith-based institutions and how they fit within comparative policy contexts and school and systems improvement with an emphasis on language, literacy, inclusion, and marginalization populations. His research has examined the role of faith-based educational institutions in Africa and Latin America and explored how the institutional context shapes and influences the institutional character and contributions of faith-based education.
The other major strand in D'Agostino's research and policy engagement is in the area of systems improvement and educational policy in low-resource settings, with a focus on vulnerable children, foundational skills development, and systems-improvement. His recent work in this area focuses on language in education policy and its intersection with foundational literacy and implementation research exploring how to improve the consistent impact of promising interventions to improve student outcomes at scale.
D'Agostino has worked at the intersection of research, policy, and practice in educational development for over 20 years. He was recently the lead-PI for a cross-national study in three African countries on scaling educational reforms called Graduating from Learning Poverty, funded by Notre Dame’s Poverty Initiative and was a co-principal investigator for a USAID-funded global education research grant called SHARE (Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education), where he led cross-national studies on language and literacy policy and language and education policy for deaf-students across nine countries in Africa and Asia. His current work builds upon and is sharing contributions from these high profile studies.
D’Agostino recently founded a non-profit organization, Our Kids of South Bend, which supports a collective impact project in South Bend focused on supporting children and families from “cradle to career.” Previously, D'Agostino founded and co-led Notre Dame’s educational engagements in Haiti from 2010 to 2020, during which time he helped grow programs and research in early grade reading, teacher training, and systems strengthening. He holds a doctorate in education leadership and policy from Vanderbilt University's Peabody School of Education and a B.A. and M.Ed. from Notre Dame.
Recent Work
- “Faith-based education and development: Opportunities, challenges, and controversies” (International Journal of Educational Development)
- “Why the Philippines reversed its mother-tongue instruction policy: Tracing the erosion of political priority for first language-based education in the Philippines” (International Journal of Educational Development)
- “Proving what’s possible: tracing the generation of political priority for bilingual education in Senegal” (International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism)
- “Policy in name only: explaining the failure to generate political priority for L1-based multilingual education in Kenya” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development)
- "Reforming School Choice Systems to Reduce Segregation in Schools: A Comparative Political Economy Study of Education Reform in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands" (Peabody Journal of Education)
Courses
- Team-Based Senior Policy Capstone: Applied Policy Consulting in Global Affairs (for undergraduate global affairs
- Advising Masters in Global Affairs Integration Lab Capstone Projects (for master of global affairs
- International and Comparative Education Policy (for master of global affairs, undergraduate global affairs, and international development studies students)