Todd A. Grindal

Todd Grindal, EdD, is the President of SRI Education. Grindal provides strategic leadership across a wide range of research, evaluation, and technical assistance initiatives designed to inform education policy and practice. He has led projects for the U.S. Department of Education, the Administration for Children and Families, and through state-level partnerships in Arkansas, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Montana. His work bridges policy and practice, with a focus on methodological rigor, early childhood and special education, and the application of emerging technologies to persistent educational challenges.

Grindal’s work is grounded in close collaboration with policymakers, practitioners, and community partners to design studies that are relevant, actionable, and methodologically sound. He has led initiatives examining efforts to improve instructional coaching, reduce exclusionary discipline, expand access to inclusive education, and understand how systems and families navigate early childhood programs. He brings deep expertise in experimental and quasi-experimental methods, survey design, and policy analysis, and has contributed to cross-disciplinary innovations at the intersection of education, artificial intelligence, and digital media.

Grindal has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and regularly presents his work at scholarly conferences. He co-edited a special issue of Early Childhood Research Quarterly on Latino families’ access to early education and has received national recognition for methodological contributions, including the Applied Research Award for Advances in Methodology from the American Educational Research Association and the Journal Article of the Year award from the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. He has also been an invited speaker at the United Nations.

From 2021 to 2024, Grindal taught a graduate course on special education policy and practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he mentored future educators and policy leaders. In addition to his research and teaching, he serves in professional advisory roles, including with the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the Child Care and Early Education Policy Research Consortium.

He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was a Julius B. Richmond Fellow. Earlier in his career, he worked as an elementary and preschool teacher and school administrator.

Key projects

• Reimagining Instructional Coaching in Early Education (RICiEE)
• Reducing Exclusionary Discipline in Arkansas Early Childhood Programs 
• Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
• Ready to Learn
• The Study of Disability Services Coordinators in Head Start (2019–2024)
• The Impacts of Extreme Weather Disasters on the Implementation of Head Start Services
• Montana Continuous Improvement in Education Research to Improve Secondary School Literacy Outcomes