Patrick Graff

Patrick Graff, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, where he advises the Government Affairs team on school choice policy design, legislative strategy, and education research. He is also a research affiliate at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO). His school choice policy research has focused on four connected areas: effects of private school choice programs on participants and students in the public school system, the relative efficacy of increasing competition through school choice for broad educational system improvement in comparison to more traditional educational interventions like increased school spending, policy design features of education scholarship accounts (ESAs), and policies for supporting teachers across public, private, and charter schools.   

Across domains, Dr. Graff brings a rare combination of research, policy, and classroom experience to his work on school choice. 

Dr. Graff received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame, where he specialized in education, education policy and program evaluation, school choice, and statistics. Using statewide administrative and survey data from Indiana, his dissertation examined teacher quality across traditional public, charter, and private schools, teacher turnover, trust within schools as organizations, and the effects of new and inexperienced teachers on student disciplinary outcomes. This project also received funding from an American Educational Research Association (AERA) National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Grant and was supported by a year-long fellowship with the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. His peer-reviewed research, conducted with colleagues at Notre Dame, has been published in journals such as Educational Policy and AERA Open. These studies use longitudinal administrative data to examine how the timing and frequency of students’ assignments to different types of teachers shape academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes over time. During his time in graduate school, Dr. Graff also served as a Fellow in the Mayor’s Office in South Bend, Indiana, where he advised the mayor and his staff on education policy and served as the administration’s representative to the South Bend School Board and the South Bend Community School Corporation. 

At AFC, Dr. Graff’s most recent research has focused on the cost-effectiveness of competition from school choice in Florida for increasing public-school student achievement at scale. In a spring 2026 research synthesis, he compared the highest quality competitive effects research on Florida’s tax credit scholarship program to the effects we might reasonably expect from increased school spending at scale, as drawn from a recently published meta-analysis by top economists on the subject. He finds that competition effects in Florida delivered far more growth for public-school students than if the state had simply increased funding for public schools by that same amount over time. This finding challenges the common narrative that school choice and additional funding for public schools are necessarily in tension; in fact, school choice is among the most cost-effective ways of raising public school achievement at scale.   

Before his doctorate, Dr. Graff served as Associate Director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Teaching Fellows program at the University of Notre Dame. As an administrator in this teacher formation program, Dr. Graff helped recruit, select, and mentor new teachers serving in under-resourced Catholic schools across the country. He previously earned his master’s degree in education (M.Ed.) through the ACE program at Notre Dame. 

Dr. Graff began his education career as a third-grade teacher at Incarnation Catholic School in Tampa, Florida. Many of his students were only able to attend through tax credit scholarships provided by Step Up For Students, giving him a direct, personal understanding of how these scholarship programs operate at the school level.  

He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and four children, most of whom are now beneficiaries of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program.