Candace Hester

Candace Hester has worked on dozens of rigorous and deep evaluations to examine the capacity of school and community interventions to engender justice, resilience, dignity, and thriving. Since 2021, Dr. Hester has served as the lead evaluation partner to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform on two studies: (1) an evaluation of Indianapolis’ Gun Violence Reduction Strategy with a focus on its credible messengering components, (2) an evaluation of Oakland’s Neighborhood Opportunity and Accountability Board (NOAB) youth diversion program. These projects leverage broad analytical methods—from interviews to longitudinal surveys and rigorous synthetic controls difference-in-differences designs—to provide rich and complex understandings of implementation and impacts. The Oakland study also features a Youth Participatory Action Research project. 

Dr. Hester also leads a longstanding body of work in Arkansas. From 2018-2023 she served as the principal investigator on a suite of research studies leveraging deep descriptive and rigorous experimental designs. These studies focused on understanding the relationship between middle and early high school initiatives on students’ later life success as well as the effectiveness of different types of school communications on a families’ engagement. Currently, Dr. Hester is also supporting the City of Little Rock with building a cross-sectoral understanding of the promise of its various initiatives towards building community resilience and addressing crime.

Prior to entering graduate school, Dr. Hester was a high school math teacher for five years in Oakland, California where she received awards for excellence in teaching and teacher leadership. Dr. Hester has also served as a member of the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School for Public Policy’s teaching faculty and a What Works Clearinghouse-certified reviewer.