Associate Legislative Research Analyst

• As a note, this position has an activity that must be completed by candidates to be considered. Details and instructions are included at the bottom of the posting.

About Our Office

The Office of the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury is responsible for the audit of state and local governmental entities and participates in the general financial and administrative management and oversight of state government. The Office is led by Comptroller Jason E. Mumpower, a constitutional officer who is elected by the Tennessee General Assembly.

In the Comptroller’s Office, we strive to deliver on our mission to make government work better. We believe our success as an office depends on finding opportunities for employees to accomplish our office’s goals and answer challenges to make things better.

We want every member of our team to be excited to come to work every day and be challenged. Through dedicated hard work and commitment, every Comptroller’s Office employee accepts personal responsibility to accomplish our mission and uphold it.

Position

The Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability (OREA) is committed to producing objective and accurate research, evaluation, and analysis to inform public policy discussions and decisions in the Tennessee General Assembly. The work of OREA helps support the TN General Assembly and thereby supports the broader mission of the Comptroller's Office, to make government work better.

We are looking for an Associate Legislative Research Analyst who will be responsible for producing publications for the General Assembly on education policy issues and on other policy issues related to state and local government. To qualify for consideration, an applicant should have graduated from an accredited college or university with a Master’s degree in a field requiring knowledge of research methodology, or a Bachelor’s degree with at least one year of relevant research experience. Other combinations of education/experience, if evaluated as equivalent, may qualify an applicant for consideration.

To perform this job successfully, the candidate should possess the ability to produce publication-quality written text. The candidate should also possess a basic knowledge of the function and structure of state and local governments, of the legislative process, and of general research methodology. The candidate should have the ability to deal tactfully and professionally with the public, co-workers, and members of the General Assembly. Successful candidates will be able to express ideas and present information clearly and concisely and have organizational skills to maintain documentation of activities. Knowledge of statistical methods and the ability to use spreadsheets for analysis are also desirable.

For examples of OREA publications, please visit our website at https://www.comptroller.tn.gov/OREA/.

Major responsibilities for this position will include:

• Working individually and in a team environment to analyze complex issues in a variety of topic areas.
• Collecting and analyzing data.
• Conducting interviews.
• Developing and administering surveys and compiling survey results.
• Producing detailed publications including text, graphs, tables, and exhibits.
• Responding to requests for information from legislators, the Comptroller of the Treasury, and other officials.
• Monitoring legislative committees and analyzing the fiscal impact of legislation.

Compensation

The Comptroller’s Office offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package that includes twelve days each of annual leave and sick leave, insurance plans, pension retirement plan, 401(k), college fee waivers, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Pursuant to the Comptroller of the Treasury’s Workplace Discrimination and Harassment policy, the Office is firmly committed to the principle of fair and equal employment opportunities for its citizens and strives to protect the rights and opportunities of all people to seek, obtain, and hold employment without being subjected to illegal discrimination and harassment in the workplace. It is the Comptroller’s policy to provide an environment free of discrimination and harassment of an individual because of that person’s race, color, national origin, age (40 and over), sex, sexual orientation, transgender and gender identity status, pregnancy, religion, creed, disability, veteran’s status, or any other category protected by state and/or federal civil rights laws.

Candidate Activity

The writing activity must accompany a candidate’s application to be considered for the position of Associate Legislative Research Analyst.

Summarize the key points of this research in two to three paragraphs for a non-expert, non-technical reader.

During the school year, approximately 56.4 million students and 3.7 million teachers congregate every weekday across more than 100,000 Kindergarten-12th grade (K-12) schools across the U.S. When schools must close in an unplanned fashion, i.e., outside of the established academic calendar, interruption of the traditional education process occurs coupled with other unwanted consequences for students, families, and schools. Identifying the causes, patterns, and characteristics of prolonged unplanned school closures (PUSCs) can serve to inform preparedness in order to mitigate the economic and social consequences, which may disproportionately affect some students and their families.

From August 1, 2011, through June 30, 2019, daily systematic online searches were conducted to collect data on publicly announced unplanned school closures lasting 1 school days in the United States. Closures were categorized as prolonged when schools were closed for 5 unplanned days. Among 120,579 district-wide or individual school closure events with closure duration of 1 days during this period, there were 2,259 (1.9%) PUSC events. The 2,259 PUSC events corresponded to 22,112 school closures in 19,582 unique schools; 21,585 (97.6%) school closures were due to 1,732 district-wide closure events, and the remaining 527 (2.4%) represented individual school closures.

During the eight-year period, more than 13 million students and 800,000 teachers were affected by PUSCs. Among public-school PUSCs, a median of 62.9% of students were eligible for subsidized school meals. The median duration of PUSCs was six days. The majority of PUSCs were in cities (34.7%) and suburban areas (33.5%), as compared to rural areas (22.1%) or towns (9.5%). Elementary schools accounted for the largest proportion of PUSCs (41.6%), followed by elementary-middle schools (19.9%), and high schools (16.4%).

Nearly half of all PUSCs were due to natural disasters (47.5%), and weather-related PUSCs accounted for 35.1% of PUSCs. Budget/teacher strike caused 14.8% of the PUSCs, the majority of which were reported during the 2017-18 academic year. Illness, environmental issues, building/utility problems, and violence accounted for a combined 2.6% of all PUSCs. Violence-related PUSCs were highest in 2014-15, among which 96% were the result of a district-wide closures in response to local unrest and the perceived threat to student safety.

Among illness-related PUSCs, the majority were recorded in Kentucky and Tennessee (52.4% and 34.1%, respectively) during the eight-year period. The illness-related PUSCs were primarily attributed to influenza and influenza-like illnesses. Natural disasters and extreme weather were associated with sixteen of the top twenty reasons for PUSCs. Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, which occurred in 2017, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, caused more than 10 million student-days lost each. Large snowfalls in Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Washington also caused substantial numbers of student-days lost. Just four PUSCs were associated with reasons other than natural disasters or extreme weather; all four were attributed to teacher strikes (one each in Illinois, Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia) and led to a combined total of approximately 12.1 million student-days lost.

The costs and consequences of PUSC are topics of intense contemporary research interest, especially in view of COVID-19-related school closures, as well as subsequent modifications of instruction delivery methods and implementation of alternate methods to continue subsidized school meal programs. This study illustrates that even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, anywhere from several hundred to several thousand schools were closed for a prolonged period (one entire school week or longer) each year. Because PUSCs will likely continue to be necessitated by unforeseen circumstances, it is important to prepare ahead of these events for the disruption of routine services, most notably school-based supplemental feeding programs for both students and their families.

Among studies that have identified costs and consequences of PUSCs, uncertainty of duration, inability to arrange alternative childcare, lost income, and missing free/reduced priced meals were often reported. Disruption to normal methods of education delivery may lead to negative impacts on student learning (i.e., “learning loss”) and may have imposed significant challenges to school practitioners in the transition to distance learning, particularly among schools that had not implemented distance learning prior to the event. Meanwhile, the disruption in the provision of auxiliary services, such as school-based subsidized meal programs, may result in decreased food security. The consequences of PUSCs may also disproportionately impact those of racial/ethnic minority populations, including greater gaps in access to meals, educational resources, and childcare.

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