Research has always played a role in school integration advocacy, and NCSD believes that current research should inform the policy development process in a more systematic way. NCSD aims to increase real time, two-way communication between advocates and researchers on key contested questions. We do this by: 1) consulting with leading educational researchers on important issues through our research advisory panel; and 2) connecting both emerging and already-established school diversity scholars and researchers with one another and with integration program practitioners through our research network.
NCSD Research Advisory Panel – The NCSD has convened a group of leading researchers to help us ensure that our advocacy efforts are informed by the most current, methodologically sound research on school integration. Many educational policymakers shy away from pursing integration without considering the strong research evidence demonstrating its value as an educational reform tool. On the other hand, school integration advocates have not always acknowledged, been aware of, or adequately addressed the challenges that arise in racially and economically diverse learning environments. The NCSD’s advocacy efforts take these challenges into account.
CURRENT RESEARCH ADVISORY PANEL MEMBERS:
(click here for a listing of related publications and here for a list of past members):
Casey Cobb, University of Connecticut
Casey D. Cobb is Associate Dean and Professor of Educational Leadership at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include policies on school choice, integration, accountability, and school reform, where he examines the implications for equity and educational opportunity. Dr. Cobb is Editor of Educational Administration Quarterly, a ranked Sage and UCEA journal. He is co-author of Fundamentals of Statistical Reasoning in Education (Wiley/Jossey Bass, 4th ed.) and Leading dynamic schools (Corwin Press). Dr. Cobb has published in such journals as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, Education and Urban Society, Educational Leadership, and the Peabody Journal of Education. Dr. Cobb is a National Education Policy Center Fellow and member of the Research Advisory Panel for the National Coalition on School Diversity. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Arizona State University.
Research in Action
- Cobb has studied the effectiveness of magnet schools in Connecticut. See, e.g. Robert Bifulco, Casey Cobb & Courtney Bell, Evaluation of Connecticut’s Interdistrict Magnet Schools, The Center for Education Policy Analysis (University of Connecticut, 2009).
John Diamond, University of Wisconsin – Madison
John B. Diamond is Professor of Sociology and Education Policy at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, he was the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Education at Wisconsin – Madison. A sociologist of race and education, he studies the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, examining how educational leadership, policies, and practices operate through school organizations to shape students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. Diamond has published widely in sociology and education journals and is the co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (with Amanda Lewis) and Distributed Leadership in Practice (co-edited with James Spillane). Diamond is currently writing a new book, Defending the Color Line, on race and education.
His current research focuses on race, leadership, and organizational change in urban and suburban schools. He recently received a major grant from the Wallace Foundation to study the development and implementation of equity-centered principal pipelines in several school districts across the United States with colleagues from UW-Madison and other institutions.
An engaged scholar, Diamond is an Advisory Board Member of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology Action Network and a National Planning Team Member of the Urban Research Action Network (URBAN). He is the co-editor of Sociology of Education (with Odis Johnson Jr).
Erica Frankenberg, Penn State University
Erica Frankenberg (Ed.D., Harvard University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies in the College of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests focus on racial desegregation and inequality in K-12 schools, and the connections between school segregation and other metropolitan policies. Dr. Frankenberg is co-editor of Integrating Schools in a Changing Society: New Policies and Legal Options for a Multiracial Generation (with Elizabeth DeBray), from the University of North Carolina Press. She is also a co-editor of Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in America’s Schools (with Gary Orfield), published by the University of Virginia Press (2007). Her work has also been published in education policy journals, law reviews, housing journals, and practitioner publications.
Dr. Frankenberg’s research has examined how the design of school choice policy affects racial and economic student stratification. This has included examining the segregation trends in charter schools as well as analyzing state and federal policy to understand why such patterns of segregation exist in charter schools. She has co-authored (with Gary Orfield) a book to be published in spring 2013 on this topic, Educational Delusions? Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make it Fair (from University of California Press). In addition to her teaching and research, she is actively involved with Division L of the American Educational Research Association, including serving on annual meeting program committees and the affirmative action committee. In 2013, she will begin her service as Division L Secretary.
Jennifer Jellison Holme, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Jennifer Jellison Holme is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy and Planning in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Holme’s research focuses on the politics and implementation of educational policy, with a particular focus on the relationship among school reform, equity, and diversity in schools. She specifically seeks to understand how the structure of opportunity within metropolitan areas relates to schooling conditions and outcomes for students, and to examine how educational policies interact with, or are influenced by, these larger metropolitan opportunity structures. Her research interests include: school desegregation (currently focusing on inter-district programs), high stakes testing (exit level testing); and school choice policy. Dr. Holme’s work has been published in Teachers College Record (2013), the American Educational Research Journal (2012), the Review of Educational Research (2010), and the Harvard Educational Review (2002). Dr. Holme is also co-author of Both Sides Now: The Story of Desegregation’s Graduates (2009, University of California Press).
Rucker Johnson, University of California, Berkeley
Rucker Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate and postdoctoral training is in labor and health economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 2002 from the University of Michigan and was the recipient of three national dissertation awards. Johnson was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy from 2002 to 2004. His work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances. He has focused on such topics as low-wage labor markets, spatial mismatch, the societal consequences of incarceration, the socioeconomic determinants of health disparities over the life course, and the effects of growing up poor and poor infant health on childhood cognition, child health, educational attainment, and later-life health and socioeconomic success.
Roslyn Mickelson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, Women and Gender Studies, and Information Technology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She taught high school social studies in southern California for nine years prior to enrolling in her doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. After she received her Ph.D. Mickelson spent a postdoctoral fellowship year at the University of Michigan’s Bush Program in Child Development and Social Policy. Mickelson is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the National Educational Policy Center.
Mickelson’s research focuses upon the political economy of schooling and school reform, particularly the relationships among race, ethnicity, gender, class, and educational organization, processes, and outcomes. Since the late 1990s she has investigated school desegregation and resegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina and more recently, across the nation. She developed a searchable database, the Diversity in Education Archive, which holds almost 600 detailed summaries of empirical research about the relationship between school racial and socioeconomic composition and school outcomes. Harvard Education Press will publish her forthcoming coedited book, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte in early 2015. Additionally, with support from the National Science Foundation, Mickelson and her colleagues are investigating the social structural, individual, and, K-16 educational factors that contribute to successfully majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina system.
Research in Action
- Roslyn was one of the NCSD Steering Committee and Research Advisory Panel members who traveled to Minneapolis in 2011 for an important hearing on Minnesota’s school integration rule. Her testimony summarized social science research on the academic benefits of racial integration. Find out more here.
Pedro Noguera, University of California, Los Angeles
Pedro Noguera is a Distinguished Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA. His research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional and global contexts. He is the author of eleven books and over 200 articles and monographs. He serves on the boards of numerous national and local organizations and appears as a regular commentator on educational issues on CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and other national news outlets. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA he served as a tenured professor and holder of endowed chairs at New York University (2003 – 2015) Harvard University (2000 – 2003) and the University of California, Berkeley (1990 – 2000). From 2009 – 2012 he served as a Trustee for the State University of New York (SUNY) as an appointee of the Governor. In 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Education. Noguera recently received awards from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, from the National Association of Secondary Principals, and from the McSilver Institute at NYU for his research and advocacy efforts aimed at fighting poverty.
sean reardon, Stanford University
Sean Reardon is the endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and is Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. In addition, he develops methods of measuring social and educational inequality (including the measurement of segregation and achievement gaps) and methods of causal inference in educational and social science research. He teaches graduate courses in applied statistical methods, with a particular emphasis on the application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to the investigation of issues of educational policy and practice. Sean received his doctorate in education in 1997 from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, and has been a recipient of a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, a Carnegie Scholar Award, and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Emory University
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Professor of History of American Education and of Qualitative Research Methods at Emory University. She has written numerous articles and book chapters, including a series of manuscripts on the segregated schooling of African American children in the South that have appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, Review of Education Research, and the American Educational Research Journal. She has received the Raymond Cattell Early Career Award, the Best New Female Scholar Award from the Research Focus on Black Education, and the Best New Book Award from the History Division, all from AERA. She is also a recipient of the Young Scholars Award from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and is former National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her most recent book, Race-ing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care and Justice (co-edited with John Snarey), received the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Moral Development and Education AERA SIG. Her newest book, Hello Professor: The Professional Development and School Leadership of a Black Principal in the Segregated South, 1957-1968, is currently in press.
Professor Walker’s research focus on segregated schooling in the south. Her work considers both portraits of individual school communities (Their Highest Potential, University of North Carolina Press) and, more recently, the network of educational activity that undergirded the development of these schools throughout the South. The latter results are reported in the American Educational Research Association Journal, the Review of Educational Research, and a book forthcoming (Principal Leaders, University of North Carolina Press).
Research in Action
- In 2012 Professor Siddle Walker delivered the 8th Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research. Initiated in 2004, the lecture is designed to feature the important role of research in advancing the understanding of equality and equity in education, and commemorates the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme court took scientific reserach into account in issuing its seminal ruling. Watch Professor Siddle Walker’s lecture here.
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University
Dr. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley’s research focuses on race, education and inequality, with a particular emphasis on examining segregation and resegregation in U.S. metropolitan areas. Her work also examines strategies for promoting inclusive school communities and policy options for a truly integrated society. She received her PhD in Urban Schooling from UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is a research associate at the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Prior to earning her doctorate, Dr. Siegel-Hawley taught high school history in Baltimore City Schools and Richmond Public Schools.
Some of Dr. Siegel-Hawley’s most recent publications include:
- Race, Choice and Richmond Schools: New Opportunities and Challenges for Diversity in Urban Districts (The Urban Review, 2014)
- Educational Gerrymandering? Race and Attendance Boundaries in a Racially Changing Suburb (Harvard Educational Review, 2013)
- City Lines, County Lines, Color Lines: An Analysis of School and Housing Segregation in Four Southern Metropolitan Areas, 1990-2010 (Teachers College Record, 2013)
Amy Stuart Wells, Columbia University
Amy Stuart Wells is a Professor of Sociology and Education, and the Coordinator of Policy Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Wells’s research and writing has focused broadly on issues of race and education and more specifically on educational policies, such as school desegregation, school choice, charter schools, and tracking, and how they shape and constrain opportunities for students of color. She is the recipient of several honors and awards, including a 2001-02 Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation’s Scholars Program; the 2000 Julius & Rosa Sachs Lecturer, Teachers College-Columbia University; and the 2000 AERA Early Career Award for Programmatic Research.
Dr. Wells has focused her research on educational policy, race and education, charter schools, school desegregation, and school choice. She has expertise in education policy, the privatization of education, race and ethnicity, school segregation, sociology, and urban schools and populations.
Linda Tropp, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Linda R. Tropp is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received the 2012 Distinguished Academic Outreach Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for excellence in the application of scientific knowledge to advance the public good. Tropp also received the 2013 Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award and the 2003 Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, as well as the Erikson Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, and the McKeachie Early Career Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. Tropp is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. She has been a visiting scholar at the National Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (New Zealand), the Kurt Lewin Institute (Netherlands), the Marburg Center for Conflict Studies (Germany), the Center for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion (Chile), and the International Graduate College on Conflict and Cooperation (Germany, UK, Belgium), where she has delivered lectures and taught workshops on prejudice reduction and intervention. She has worked with national organizations to present social science evidence in U.S. Supreme Court cases on racial integration, on state and national initiatives to improve interracial relations in schools, and with non-governmental and international organizations to evaluate applied programs designed to reduce racial and ethnic conflict. She is co-author of “When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact” (March 2011, Psychology Press), editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict” (June 2012, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of “Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations” (February 2011, American Psychological Association Books) and “Improving Intergroup Relations” (August 2008, Wiley-Blackwell).
Research in Action
- Linda was one of the NCSD Steering Committee and Research Advisory Panel members who traveled to Minneapolis in 2011 for an important hearing on Minnesota’s school integration rule. Her testimony summarized social science research on intergroup relations benefits of racial integration. Find out more here.