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 three connected questions: how private school choice programs affect participating students and students in public school system, how the cost-effectiveness of scaling school choice compares to more traditional educational interventions like increasing school spending, the design features of education scholarship account policies, and how policy can better support teachers across all school types.  

Dr. Graff received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame where he specialized in education policy, school choice, school improvement, program evaluation, and statistics. 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 using statewide administrative and survey data from Indiana. This project also received funding from an American Education Research Association (AERA) National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Grant and was supported by a year-long fellowship with the Advanced Institute at the University of Notre Dame. 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.  

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.  

Dr. Graff is one of the few people in the school choice field whose career authentically spans all four layers of education: classroom teacher, teacher preparation leader, doctoral researcher, and active policy practitioner. 

 — research funded by both an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Dissertation Grant Award and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Grant Award, among the most competitive dissertation funding sources in the field. 

During his doctoral studies, Patrick also served as a Graduate Fellow in the Office of Mayor Pete Buttigieg in South Bend, Indiana (August 2018–December 2019), 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 Schools Corporation — a rare practitioner placement for an active academic researcher. 

Before his doctorate, Patrick served for three years as Associate Director of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Teaching Fellows Program (2013–2016), recruiting, selecting, and mentoring annual cohorts of approximately 80 recent college graduates entering classrooms in under-resourced Catholic schools across the country. He earned his M.Ed. through the ACE program at Notre Dame. 

Patrick began his education career as a third-grade teacher at Incarnation Catholic School in Tampa, Florida (2011–2013). Many of his students attended through tax credit scholarships provided by Step Up For Students — giving him a direct, personal understanding of how school choice programs operate at the family level. Several of his own children are now beneficiaries of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program. 

At AFC, Patrick previously served as Director of Legislative Policy (September 2022–December 2025), a role in which he translated academic and empirical research into actionable legislative strategy across state and federal education policy.  

Dr. Graff also holds a BA in Philosophy and Chinese from the University of Notre Dame and completed Chinese language study at Peking University and Fu Jen Catholic University.