Professor Grissom’s research uses large data sets and draws on the perspectives of political science, public administration and economics to study the governance of K-12 education, including both its leadership/management and political dimensions. He is particularly interested in identifying the impacts of school and district leaders on teacher and student outcomes and has conducted research on principal effectiveness, human capital decision-making in schools, school board governance, and turnover among teachers, principals and superintendents. He has also published articles on the implications of the race and gender composition of the public education workforce and the public bureaucracy for the distribution of resources and outcomes among diverse groups.

His work has appeared in outlets such as American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Researcher, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Politics, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and Teachers College Record.

Grissom serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. He is also the faculty director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a research-policy-practice partnership between Peabody College and the Tennessee Department of Education that seeks to inform the state’s school improvement efforts. He is also a chancellor faculty fellow (2018-2020) and Principal Investigator (PI) of an Institute of Education Sciences-funded postdoctoral fellowship program on school leadership. Professor Grissom has current research projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wallace Foundation. He holds an M.A. in Education Policy and a Ph.D. in Political Economics from Stanford University.

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