Kalena Cortes is an associate professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Princeton University. Her research focuses on policies relating to curriculum reform, diversity in higher education, post-secondary returns to education, and educational achievement of immigrant children in the United States. She is currently on the editorial board of the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Economics of Education Review journals, and is an Associate Editor of AERA Open. She is currently serving on the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP).