Janelle Scott

• Professor at University of California, Berkeley

Drawing on Boddie’s adaptive discrimination framework, this article analyzes changes in demographic trends from 2002–2021. Our findings reveal a continuation of several longstanding trends, including increased racial/ethnic diversity in public school enrollment; deepening racial isolation within districts; persistent, high isolation for Black stude...

This article considers the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in light of current educational inequities and the impact of the pandemic. The reauthorization presents an opportunity to center equity and justice and revitalize the civil rights aspects of the law. The authors review recent studies about the myriad way...

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization...

Punitive school discipline deploys surveillance, exclusion, and corporal punishment to deter or account for perceived student misbehavior. Yet, education and legal scholarship suggests it fails to achieve stated goals and exacerbates harm. Furthermore, it is disproportionately imposed upon Black, Latinx, Native/Indigenous, LGBTQIA, and disabled stu...

A growing body of research investigates how intermediary organizations (IOs) and their networks navigate, promote, and produce evidence on social media. To date, scholars have underexplored blogs, an important milieu in which IOs produce and disseminate information. In this analysis, we broaden the emerging scholarship on evidence brokering by exam...

National philanthropies have recently played a prominent role in spending on U.S. urban school board elections, largely seeking to promote candidates who support charter schools. In Atlanta in 2017, 30 candidates competed for nine open school board seats. One practice has been to fund intermediary organisations (IOs) (e.g. advocacy groups, foundati...

Research shows that schooling contexts and social policies set up the conditions for young people of color to experience violence in regularized, systematic, and destructive ways. This policy report thus centers on questions of race and disparate racial impacts. We draw from critical race theory (CRT) to redirect how educators might talk more produ...

This article reports findings from a study that explores how Teach For America (TFA) alumni interpret the causes of and interventions for educational inequality, the leadership pathways for remedying inequality, and the career opportunities available to them as TFA affiliates. Analyzing data from 117 alumni interviews, we find that the majority of...

This chapter examines the dominant assumption governing urban school choice policy—that it provides greater educational opportunity for low-income parents and children of color, and ultimately, has the power to deliver equity for low-income communities. We review the empirical evidence on parental choice-making, and find that the dominant theory go...

Recent advances in conceptualizing structures of influence in education policymaking have emphasized the role of non-governmental actors working in networks to promote their agendas. These useful insights have allowed researchers to consider the evolution from “government” to “governance” in education policymaking, broadening the analytical scope f...

The authors situate the emergence and effects of contemporary market-based reforms within a framework of urban political economy that centers on racial inequality. They discuss how and why market-based reforms have evolved alongside racialized political and economic trends that have transformed cities over the past century, and they critically eval...

In this article, we advance a conceptual framework for the study of Teach For America (TFA) as a political and social movement with implicit and explicit ideological and political underpinnings. We argue that the second branch of TFA’s mission statement, which maintains that TFA’s greatest point of influence in public education is not in classrooms...

The increasing involvement of philanthropists in education policy has contributed to the emergence of a dynamic sector of intermediary organizations (IOs), entities that serve a number of functions in school reform, including advocacy, consultation, policy design, alternative teacher and leadership preparation, and research. In recent years, many I...

This chapter uses the policy-planning network concept to explain why charter school reform has become a prominent reform strategy, especially in urban districts serving primarily poor children of color. It then identifies components of the emerging charter school policy-planning network. Informed by social network and document analysis drawn from f...

Background/Context Parent trigger policies have become a popular option in the education reform toolbox, giving parents the potential ability to induce substantial structural changes at their local public school. This reform approach emerged in California during the Great Recession, and has since proliferated to a number of states, spurred on by po...

Nearly ten years after Katrina and the implementation of a host of new and radical education reforms in New Orleans, there remains little evidence about whether the changes have improved school performance. Despite this lack of evidence, the New Orleans model is held up as a reform success, and is being adopted by other cities. In this article the...

Public school systems across the United States have seen unprecedented expansion of incentive-based reforms, such as teacher performance pay, school choice, new governance forms, and alternative pathways to teaching and leadership. These reforms, many of which have had mixed results in evaluations of their effectiveness, are spreading despite a lac...

Purpose: In this essay, we examine the racial politics of education in the six decades after Brown. We consider the state of educational policy in an era in which market reform advocates often invoke the spirit of the Brown decision even as the Supreme Court has largely vacated the legal framework provided by Brown to desegregate schools. Backgroun...

Interviews with a broad swath of current and former Teach For America alumni and current corps members reveal a decided preference for school leaders whose personality traits are akin to superhero/ines ? charismatic, courageous, demanding ? and who have a tendency to try to usher in greater student achievement via primarily managerial agendas, rath...

This article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an “advocacy coalition framework” and the concepts of a “supply side” (mainly organizations) and “demand side” (policymakers). Drawing on interview data and documents from New Orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there since 2005, the authors examine (a)...

Researchers have noted with concern the often weak link between research evidence and policymaking, particularly in some areas such as education. In this introductory essay-dedicated to the late Carol Weiss-we consider this issue first by reflecting on how changing historical conditions can shape institutional demands on and for research production...

The rise in the influence of and spending by educational philanthropists and foundations over the past two decades, especially in the area of market-based reforms, such as charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay, is evident across the United States. Largely due to philanthropic investments, relatively new educational intermediary organizations (IO...

An increased role for the federal government and philanthropic organizations in education over the last decade, along with a growing demand for evidence by public and private policymakers, has invigorated an already vibrant sector of intermediary organizations that seek to package and promote research on educational policies and programs for policy...

Researchers have noted with concern the often weak link between research evidence and policymaking, particularly in some areas such as education. In this introductory essay—dedicated to the late Carol Weiss—we consider this issue first by reflecting on how changing historical conditions can shape institutional demands on and for research production...

In this critical analysis, I interrogate the efforts of elite education reformers to cast market-based school choice reforms as descendants of civil rights movement policies. Drawing from multidisciplinary research, including educational policy, history, and sociology, as well as the voices of contemporary educational reformers, I examine the ideol...

Drawing from historical, sociological, and policy literatures, as well as legislative activity, this article traces the intellectual and political evolution of educational equity, beginning with progressive models of redistribution and remedy to more recent neoliberal forms, which privilege parental empowerment through the expansion of school choic...

The way education reformers misunderstand the history of the civil rights struggle reveals one of the key flaws in the push for market-based educational solutions. The top-down, managerial, single-minded approach pursued by Duncan and his allies ignores the vital, grassroots efforts underway in low-income communities, many of which directly challen...

Maxwell and Donmoyer both argue in this issue of Qualitative Inquiry that narrow definitions of causality in educational research tend to disqualify qualitative research from influence (and funding) among policy makers. They propose a process view of causality that would allow qualitative researchers to make causal claims more grounded in the thick...

Public officials are increasingly contracting with the private sector for a range of educational services. With much of the focus on private sector accountability on cost-effectiveness and student performance, less attention has been given to shifts in democratic accountability. Drawing on data from the state of New York, one of the most active con...

This chapter discusses school choice as a civil rights issue. Drawing from historical, political, and sociological literatures and legal documents, the chapter discusses the factors that construct market-based choice as a civil right for poor parents of color. These include (1) conservative framing of school choice, (2) legal jurisprudence combined...

As a result of tremendous social, legal, and political movements after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the South led the nation in school desegregation from the late 1960s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, following a series of court cases in the past two decades—including a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision...

What is the landscape of the racial politics of public education in the age of Obama? To what factors can we attribute the seeming educational policy consensus from Washington, DC, to the states and from philanthropies and policy entrepreneurs in urban school districts? How should we understand opposition to the policy menu? This article examines c...

Educational privatization is rapidly expanding in many urban school districts, altering the social, political, and economic dynamics of educational policy and leadership. Yet many adherents cast privatization primarily as a fiscal or economic alternative to traditional public school management, ignoring these broader alterations. Drawing from a rev...

This article explores the relationship between charter school racial composition, school environments, and student achievement. We offer an original framework for understanding school context and its influence on schooling outcomes. We conclude that policymakers could better attend to the persistent educational inequality that has shaped U.S. schoo...

This article provides an overview to this special issue on advocacy and education. It describes three key areas of advocacy in education, including 1) Congress, states, and the courts, 2) Think tanks and philanthropies, and 3) Sociopolitical movements. It also discusses the emerging politics of advocacy within these three areas and introduces the a...

Philanthropists have long funded a wide range of educational research, practice, and policy initiatives, primarily through namesake foundations. Some observers have criticized these efforts as doing little to change the status quo in education and have called for more aggressive action on the part of this sector. Out of this critique has emerged a...

As public schools serving poor children of color continue to struggle on standardized assessments, many reformers propose that school choice and the privatization of public school management could be remedies. This approach marks a shift from efforts to improve schools from within the system. Choice advocates and reformers seeking to reduce the rol...

This article provides an updated analysis of the institutional and organizational landscape surrounding the advocacy of and opposition to vouchers and other forms of school choice over the past decade at federal/national, state, and local levels. The politics of choice grew far more complex during the 1990s, with Republican control of Congress and...

In this article Wells, Slayton, and Scott draw on data from their charter school research to question the extent to which “democratic” and “market-based” schools are dichotomous. They argue that in the current political and economic climate, free-market and deregulatory educational reforms such as charter school laws are perceived to be highly “dem...

For the last two-and-a-half years, authors Amy Stuart Wells, Alejandra Lopez, Janelle Scott, and Jennifer Jellison Holme have been engaged with a team of researchers in a comprehensive qualitative study of charter schools in ten California school districts. They have emerged from this study with a new understanding of how the implementation of a sp...

This paper uses the charter schools legislation of three states, California, Arizona and Michigan, as a lens to understand the policy values embodied in school choice reforms. We question the prevailing rubrics of the Center for Education Reform and the American Federation of Teachers. Briefly stated, the former ranks laws as either "strong" or "we...