Research Projects

Using tools from political science, education, sociology, history, Black studies, and gender studies, I explore a set of empirical puzzles on how ideas around equity are built into education politics and policy. How did ideas about equity develop over the course of the 20th century, and how do these political ideas operate in current education systems to shape learning experiences?

My dual lens on learning and governance highlights the central role of educational leaders in protecting and innovating democratic processes: how we generate ideas around equity via learning, how we build these ideas into systems, and how we renegotiate them over time.

  • Accountability policy is often understood in research and policy as a bipartisan achievement. Yet, some scholars link accountability to the reproduction of racial and economic inequities. My dissertation project, Constructing Democratic and Respectable Educational Rights, 1929-1990, provokes a reckoning with the institutional formation of accountability as democratic backsliding. 

    By examining the personal, school, and organizational archival papers of civil rights strategists primarily in the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and federal policymakers in the U.S. Department of Education, I uncover and chart a four-step process. This process reveals how educational accountability undermined, via exclusionary decision-making, high-stakes testing, and privatization, the democratizing role of critical literacy pedagogies in driving interclass solidarities and collective agenda-setting in the civil rights movement.

    My findings deepen existing accounts of the long civil rights movement and the political history of literacy education by identifying Black women civil rights leaders’ innovation of critical literacy pedagogies to democratize both formal political institutions (e.g., electoral politics) and the civil rights movement, itself (Dawson, 2001; Ewing, 2025; Givens, 2021; Goluboff, 2009; Hall, 2005 Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Perlstein, 2002; Terry, 2025; Tierney & Pierson, 2021).

    Conceptually, my findings offer new traction for treating critical literacy pedagogies as tools for democratic civic leadership, and I propose and develop the concept of a critical civic literacy institution as a core structural mechanism that can link literacy education to democratization. Finally, my project connects and extends understandings of when and how race, class, and gender norms can become linked in policy (Cohen, 1999; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Strolovich, 2023; Schneider & Ingram, 1993).

  • In an article conditionally accepted at the American Education Research Journal titled “Racialized Reactivity: How Metrics can Reproduce Educational Inequality,” my co-authors and I examined the political formation and application of educational “quality” metrics in U.S. medical education. The standardized metrics advanced in the Carnegie-funded Flexner Report (1909) are widely credited with driving the disproportionate closure of Black medical schools; by 1923 only Howard and Meharry were left in existence. One estimate suggests that the Black medical colleges closed during this period could have educated about 30,000 additional Black doctors (Campbell et al., 2020). Yet, the explanatory mechanisms linking race-neutral standards to racialized consequences remain underexamined. 

    By engaging in a historical archival analysis of over 1,200 documents, we uncover and explain how ostensibly race-neutral metrics of school quality can produce and maintain racialized inequities. We introduce racialized reactivity to explain, first, how racialized logics about the purpose of education and unequal institutional investments become embedded in standards of “quality,” and second, how those standards then legitimate the regulation and racialized distribution of resources across a field. Our findings offer new traction for understanding when and how standards-setting — a tool now used by some political and educational officials — can structure, maintain, and naturalize racialized access to educational opportunity over time.

  • In a forthcoming article in Review of Research in Education (RRE), my research team conducted a systematic review of 242 empirical studies of educational change via care work. Our ethic and model of educational interbelonging joins and extends an innovative branch of scholarship that reconceptualizes educational equity through the politics of care. Our model centers the triadic activity of students, families, and school-based educators and administrators; this provides a lens into how public school systems can play a reparative role in addressing histories of systemic racism and the gender binary in education.

    In a book chapter on Incivility and Workplace Toxicity in P-12 Schools, I led a research team to combine historical case studies, political discourse analysis, and semi-structured interviews of school leaders to identify historical and contemporary examples of democratic civic engagement despite broader moral panic around race, gender, and sexuality.