Jens Ludwig
Faculty Co-Director
Connect
Expertise
Book release coming April 2025 – Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.
Learn more.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, and co-director of the Education Lab. He helped found the Crime Lab and Education Lab to work closely with the public sector to solve pressing social problems. These partnerships have led to important policy changes in cities around the country, including Chicago and New York, and have been featured in national news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, PBS News Hour, and National Public Radio, and the scientific basis for these policies have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals like the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science, and Nature. In 2012 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.
Realizing the Promise of High Dosage Tutoring at Scale: Preliminary Evidence for the Field
This technical report outlines preliminary results from the Personalized Learning Initiative showing that high dosage tutoring can be scaled and can work–even when delivered in the aftermath of the pandemic and in diverse academic settings.
Overcoming Pandemic-Induced Learning Loss
The Education Lab’s faculty co-directors, Dr. Jens Ludwig, professor at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Jon Guryan, professor at Northwestern University, published a paper commissioned by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group for its 2023 policy volume.
Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes Among Adolescents
Read our academic paper on the early Saga studies published in the American Economic Review.
The Effect of Mentoring on School Attendance and Academic Outcomes: A Randomized Evaluation of the Check & Connect Program
This National Bureau of Economic Research paper investigates the impact of a structured student monitoring and mentoring program called Check & Connect (C&C), aimed at mitigating the effects of reduced resources for school attendance enforcement in urban school systems.
Personalized Learning Initiative
The Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI) is a moonshot to overcome pandemic learning loss and aims to bring high-dosage tutoring to students nationwide.
Personalized Learning Initiative: Tutor Corps Evaluation
The University of Chicago Education Lab is partnering with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to scale personalized tutoring in the wake of the pandemic.
Saga Scale-Up
In partnership with Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE), and Saga Education, the Education Lab worked to scale up a promising high-dosage tutoring model that improves academic outcomes.
Saga Match
The Education Lab, in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Saga Education, evaluated a promising high-dosage math tutoring model to improve students’ math achievement.
Latest Updates
Jens Ludwig and Randall Stephenson: What America can learn from ‘Toyota Way’ to improve education outcomes
Jens Ludwig and Randall Stephenson present a transformative idea to improve learning outcomes in the U.S.
Inside the Lab: Using tutoring to reverse pandemic-era learning loss
The University of Chicago goes inside the Education Lab to learn how experts are working with public school districts nationwide to tackle learning loss and scale solutions to set students up for future success.
Commentary: Counterintuitive strategies for overcoming pandemic learning loss with high-dosage tutoring
The Education Lab’s Monica Bhatt, Jon Guryan, and Jens Ludwig outline strategies for schools and districts to overcome pandemic-induced learning loss and highlight results from our study of a high-dosage tutoring model–what we call “Saga Technology.”
