Dr. Seth B. Hunter
PhD, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University
Associate Professor
EdPolicyForward
Education Leadership
Contact Information
Phone: (703) 993-4485
Email: shunte (@gmu.edu)
George Mason University
Fairfax Campus
Thompson Hall 1306
4400 University Dr.
MS 4C2
Fairfax, VA 22030
Curriculum Vitae
Profile
Dr. Seth B Hunter is an Associate Professor of Education Leadership and Policy with a Mason affiliation in Research Methods. He is also a Senior Fellow at EdPolicyForward, the Center for Education Policy at Mason, and a Fellow with the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a partnership among Vanderbilt University, the Tennessee Department of Education, and other researchers. His research interests concern educator and organizational effectiveness, research use by policymakers and practitioners, and human-machine partnerships. To explore these topics, Dr. Hunter applies multiple methods (econometric, psychometric, computational, descriptive, and qualitative) and draws on multiple frameworks (psychological, economic, leadership, management, and educational). Dr. Hunter's work appears in several top-tier education journals, including Educational Researcher, Education Administration Quarterly, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the American Journal of Education, and the American Educational Research Journal.
Before his academic career, Dr. Hunter worked/ served in various K-12 organizations, including the Kentucky Department of Education as a field agent supporting teacher leaders, principals, and superintendents; the Kentucky Council of Teachers of Mathematics as President; the Kentucky Education Association as State Representative; and classroom teacher of middle and high school students.
Dr. Hunter has advised the Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia Departments of Education, a multistate rurally-focused teacher evaluation organization in the Midwestern USA, and several school districts on education policy and practice matters.
Dr. Hunter is happily married to Dr. Amy English Hunter, and they are the proud parents of two children. Dr. Hunter loves barbecuing, ice hockey, puzzles, interesting foods, and many kinds of (hi fi) music.
Research Interests
Practices and policies concerning educator evaluation and observation
Instructional coaching for school improvement
Education policy
Research use by policymakers and practitioners
Human-machine partnerships
Recent Publications
See CV section for more information.
* student co-author
Hunter, S. B. & Steinberg, M. (Forthcoming). Saving the Best for Last: Rating Elevation in Low-Performing and Novice Teachers' Final Formal Observations. Educational Researcher.
Bowser, K. M.* & Hunter, S. B. (Conditional Acceptance). Time to Change? Switching from One Set of Teacher Evaluation Reforms to Another and its Association with Student Achievement Scores. Journal of Education Human Resources.
Kho, A. & Hunter, S. B. (Online). Free Meals for All: The Effects of the Community Eligibility Provision in Tennessee. Educational Studies. doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2025.2452619
Hunter, S. B., Kho, A. & Bowser, K. M.* (2025). Policy-Assigned Teacher Observations, Their Implementation, and Student Discipline Outcomes: Main, Mediated, and Moderated Relationships. American Educational Research Journal, 62(6), 1173-1206.
Akter, S. S.*, Hunter, S. B., Woo, D., & Anastasopoulos, A. (2025). Costs and Benefits of AI-Enabled Topic Modeling in P-20 Research: The Case of School Improvement Plans. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), co-located with the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 025).
https://aclanthology.org/2025.bea-1.34.pdf
Hunter, S. B. & Kho, A. (2025). The Effects of Teacher Evaluation Policy on Student Achievement and Teacher Turnover: Leveraging Teacher Accountability and Teacher Development. Journal of Education Human Resources, 43(3), 582-633.