About groundswell

Groundswell provides clients with custom research products aimed at building evidence on what inputs are most effective to best support child outcomes and alleviate inequality. Leveraging innovative approaches to research, the Groundswell team collaborates with clients to design meaningful methods of inquiry into important programmatic and operational questions. The Groundswell team has expertise in program and policy evaluation, causal inference, qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis, meta analysis, research design and framework development, and training/workshop facilitation on these topics. Groundswell works with clients to develop strategies to share this critical information with relevant stakeholders and to utilize findings to catalyze learning opportunities.

Clay Westrope

President, Co-Founder

Clay Westrope brings a unique perspective to his work with his experience in multi-sector international development and humanitarian research. Mr. Westrope leads the design, analysis, and promotion of high-quality research on measurement and evaluation of education and child development programming in low- and middle-income country contexts. His areas of research focus include oral language development, early grade reading acquisition, and social and emotional learning. He works with stakeholders across the development and humanitarian spectrum to examine which interventions are most effective for children’s learning and development in low-resource settings. Mr. Westrope has worked for a variety of international organizations and has independently consulted for institutions across the development-humanitarian spectrum. Clay Westrope holds a M.A in sustainable international development from Brandeis University and a B.A. in psychology from Boston College.

Dr. David Blazar

Vice President, Co-Founder

Dr. David Blazar has extensive experience working with education practitioners and policymakers in the United States to examine the equitable allocation of educational resources, with a focus on teachers and teacher professional learning. His research has been published in American Education Research Journal, Economics of Education Review, Educational Researcher, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Review of Educational Research, among other publications; as well as covered in national press outlets including The Atlantic, ChalkBeat, Education Week, The Hechinger Report, and U.S. News and World Report. Dr. Blazar received the Jean Flanigan Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Education Finance and Policy, and he was recognized as an emerging education policy scholar by the Fordham Institute. Dr. Blazar received his doctorate in Quantitative Policy Analysis from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds an Ed.M. in policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in 
history and literature from Harvard College. Prior to graduate school, he taught high-school English
Language Arts in New York City.