NEPC Topic Experts on Market-Based School Reforms

Samuel E. Abrams is the director of NEPC’s International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization (IPSEP), launched in 2024, and the author of Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016). In addition, he has written on education policy for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. From 2015 to 2024, he served as the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2022-23, he served as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Turku in Finland, where he remains a visiting scholar. For his advancement of the understanding of Finnish education in the United States, he was knighted by the Finnish government in 2012. Abrams was previously a high school history teacher for 18 years. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia.

Email Sam Abrams at: samuel.abrams@utu.fi

Frank Adamson is an Associate Professor of Education Leadership and Policy Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He studies relationships between political and economic systems and education equity and opportunity in the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Adamson’s research areas include education finance, education privatization, advocacy, and the legal right to education. His latest volume, Realizing the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: Human Rights, Public Education, and the Role of Private Actors in Education, analyzes the application of international human rights law in education. On the Price of Opportunity project that studies the actual cost for education systems to realize their role as great equalizers, he studies how stakeholders engage in “opportunity dreaming” and social sector supports within and outside of schools. Dr. Adamson has written about the impact of charter school reform on students and communities in both Oakland and New Orleans, teacher salary differences in New York and California labor markets, has completed studies for the USDOE, OECD, IEA, and UNESCO, including analyses of PISA and TIMSS, and has produced 4 books and over 50 publications. Dr. Adamson holds an MA in Sociology and a Ph.D. in International Comparative Education, both from Stanford University.   

Email Frank Adamson at: adamson@csus.edu

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  He also holds Distinguished Professor appointments at the University of Manchester and Northeast Normal University in China.  A former elementary and secondary school teacher and past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educational systems, governments, universities, unions, and activist and dissident groups throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice.

Professor Apple has written extensively on the politics of educational reform, on the relationship between culture and power, and on education for social justice.  Among his recent books are: The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education; The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education; Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education; and most recently Knowledge, Power, and Education; and Can Education Change Society?  His books and articles have won numerous awards and have been translated into many languages.

Professor Apple has been selected as one of the fifty most important educational scholars in the 20th Century.  His books Ideology and Curriculum and Official Knowledge were also selected as two of the most significant books on education in the 20th Century.

He has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Educational Research Association, the UCLA Medal for "Outstanding Academic Achievement," and a number of honorary doctorates by universities throughout the world.

Email Michael W. Apple at: apple@education.wisc.edu

Derek Black is one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy.  He focuses on educational equality, school funding, the constitutional right to education, segregation, and the federal role in schools. He has published over thirty scholarly articles in the nation’s top legal journals, including the flagship journals at Yale, Stanford, New York University, California-Berkeley, Cornell, Northwestern and Vanderbilt. That work has been cited several times in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It has also drawn him into litigation disputes over school funding and federal policy, where he has served as an expert witness and consultant.

He is currently a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, where he holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law and directs the Constitutional Law Center. He began his career in teaching at Howard University School of Law, where he founded and directed the Education Rights Center. Prior to teaching, he litigated education cases at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.   

Email Derek Black at: blackdw@law.sc.edu

Effective July 1, 2024, Katrina Bulkley will be Dean of Teachers College at Ball State University. She was previously at Montclair State University, serving as a university innovation fellow working within the president’s office, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Services, chair of the Department of Educational Leadership, and Professor of Educational Leadership. 

Bulkley's research examines the intersection of policy and leadership in efforts to increase market-linked practices in education and enhance accountability and data-driven change. She studies issues around the increasing use of new governance structures and non-public actors to improve public education (with a particular focus on urban education). She is the lead author of Challenging the One Best System: The Portfolio Management Model and Urban School Governance (Harvard Education Press, November, 2020). This project, funded through a Lyle Spencer Research Award by the Spencer Foundation, examined the connections between system-level governance change and educational practice in Denver, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. 

As a Research Partner with the IES-funded National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, she has studied state policy and choice, including the role of charter school authorizers in addressing the needs of historically marginalized populations and the impact of COVID-19 on school choice.

Email Katrina Bulkley at: katrina.bulkley@bsu.edu

Sean P. Corcoran is Associate Professor of Public Policy & Education, and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Corcoran conducts research in applied microeconomics, specifically the economics of education and state and local public finance. His published papers have examined long-run trends in teacher quality, the impact of income inequality and school finance reform on education funding in the United States, the properties of “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness, and the high school choices of middle school students in New York City. Together with colleagues at Princeton, Columbia, and Seton Hall, he recently fielded several large-scale randomized controlled trials of information supports for school choice in NYC.

Email Sean P. Corcoran at: sean.p.corcoran@vanderbilt.edu 

Maia Cucchiara is an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. A former teacher, she holds a joint Ph.D. in Education and Sociology. Her research uses qualitative methods, especially ethnography, to examine people’s lived experiences with education policy in the urban context. Dr. Cucchiara has conducted research on education and urban revitalization, school choice, parenting education, and urban school “reform.” Her latest work, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on efforts to improve school culture in urban high schools. Dr. Cucchiara is the author of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities:  Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and is currently working on a book about innovative urban high schools.

Email Maia Cucchiara at: maia.cucchiara@temple.edu

Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr. heads a management, education, and litigation consultant group.  He earned a B.A. degree from North Carolina Central University, a Masters and Ph.D from Michigan State University, and a post-doctoral Masters in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He most recently served as Professor of Community Management & Policy Practice in the School of Social Work, Associate Director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center in the Kenan Institute in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, and as a Fellow in the Center for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He was previously Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy & Community Studies in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an adjunct professor in the Departments of Curriculum & Instruction, Urban Studies, and Allied Health.

Dr. Farrell has served as a consultant to NEA, AFT, and their state and local affiliates.

Dr. Farrell has published numerous essays and articles on K-12 education, the agenda to privatize public schools, diversity, social and immigration issues, and death penalty mitigation.  He has appeared on National Public Radio (NPR)—The Connection and the Today Show (with Matt Lauer) to discuss public education (vouchers, charters, and school privatization).  He currently writes a weekly column, “Defending Public Education,” for Black Commentator, an online Journal. 

Email Walter C. Farrell, Jr. at: wcfpr@bellsouth.net

Gene V Glass is Regents' Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. He is also currently a Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center. Trained originally in statistics, his interests broadened to include psychotherapy research, evaluation methodology, and policy analysis. He was twice (1968, 1970) honored with the Palmer O. Johnson award of the American Educational Research Association; and in 1984, he received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award of the American Evaluation Association. He is a recipient of the Cattell Award of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. His work on meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcomes with Mary Lee Smith was named as one of the Forty Studies that Changed Psychology in the book of the same name by Roger R. Hock (1999). His Ph.D. was awarded in 1965 by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in educational psychology with a minor in mathematical statistics. His more recent contributions to the analysis of education policy include Fertilizers, Pills and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America (2008), and 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (2014) with D.C. Berliner & Associates.

Email Gene V Glass at: glass@asu.edu or gvglass@gmail.com

Huriya Jabbar is an associate professor of education policy at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Her research uses sociological and critical theories to examine how market-based ideas in PK-12 and higher education shape inequality, opportunity, and democracy in the U.S. She is currently studying school choice policy and school leaders' behavioral responses to competition; choice and decision-making in higher education; and teacher job choices, recruitment, and retention.

Email Huriya Jabbar at hjabbar@usc.edu

Dr. Kevin Kumashiro (https://www.kevinkumashiro.com) is the founding chair of the national network, Education Deans for Justice and Equity (EDJE).  He is an internationally recognized expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice, with a wide-ranging list of accomplishments and awards as a scholar, educator, leader, and advocate.  Dr. Kumashiro is the former Dean of the Schools of Education at the University of San Francisco and Hofstra University, and is the award-winning author or editor of ten books, including Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning toward Social Justice, and most recently, Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education. His recent awards include the 2016 Social Justice in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling.

Email Kevin K. Kumashiro at: kevin@kevinkumashiro.com

Christopher Lubienski is a professor of education policy at Indiana University and Director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. His research focuses on the intersections of public and private interests in education in areas such as school choice, charter schools, voucher programs, and home-schooling, as well as in education policymaking. He was a post-doctoral Fellow with the National Academy of Education, and with the Advanced Studies Fellowship program at Brown University. More recently, he was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar for New Zealand, where he studies school policies and student enrollment patterns. His current research is on the equity effects of schools’ organizational behavior in “local education markets," and policymakers' use of research evidence.

Email Christopher Lubienski at: clubiens@iu.edu

Following a decade as the Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, William J. Mathis serves as a Senior Policy Advisor to the center. He was a co-recipient of the national Friend of Public Education award. As the superintendent of schools in Brandon, Vermont, he was a National Superintendent of the Year finalist and a Vermont Superintendent of the Year. A plaintiff and finance expert in the successful school funding lawsuit, the state’s educational system was transformed. He was appointed to the Vermont State Board of Education and served as vice-chair. In earlier work he was Deputy Assistant Commissioner in New Jersey where he directed the state’s assessment system and evaluated the Constitutionality of the school system. Consultant work across the nation followed. He has published or presented research on finance, assessment, accountability, standards, cost-effectiveness, education reform, history, and Constitutional issues. He also serves on various editorial boards and frequently publishes commentaries on educational policy issues. He has co-edited several books and has been featured in several periodicals. He is a board member of the Horace Mann League and sits on his local school board.

Email William J. Mathis at: williamjmathis@gmail.com

Julie Fisher Mead is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Mead researches and writes about topics related to the legal aspects of education. Her research centers on legal issues related to special education and legal issues raised by various forms of school choice, including charter schools and vouchers.

Email Julie Fisher Mead at: jmead@education.wisc.edu

Gary Miron is professor of evaluation, measurement, and research at Western Michigan University. He has extensive experience evaluating school reforms and education policies. Over the past two decades he has conducted several studies of school choice programs in Europe and in the United States, including nine state evaluations of charter school reforms. In recent years, his research has increasingly focused on the education management organizations (EMOs) and efforts to create systemic change in urban schools in Michigan and rural schools in Louisiana. Prior to coming to Western Michigan University, Dr. Miron worked for 10 years at Stockholm University in Sweden.


Email Gary Miron at: garmiron@gmail.com

Tel. 269-599-7965

NEPC Director Alex Molnar founded NEPC with Kevin Welner in 2010. He is a Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and also co-directs the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU). He has published numerous articles on social and educational policy and practice. For the past three decades, he has studied and written about commercial activities in schools. Molnar has also researched the impact of reduced class size on student achievement and market-based school reforms such as private school vouchers, charter schools, virtual schools, and for-profit schools. Molnar has a B.A. in history, political science, and education; two masters degrees, one in history and one in social welfare; a Specialist's Certificate in educational administration; and a Ph.D. in urban education. His most recent book, Sold Out: How Marketing in School Threatens Children's Well-Being and Undermines their Education, with Faith Boninger, was released in 2015. 

Email Alex Molnar at: nepc.molnar@protonmail.com

Yongmei Ni is a professor and the chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah. She also serves as an Assistant Director at the Utah Education Policy Center. Her research examines educational policies related to school choice to improve education access, equity, and effectiveness for all students, and the importance of school leadership and leadership preparation programs. Her policy research has examined various issues related to the effects of charter school policies on racial/ethnic segregation and social stratification, effectiveness, resource allocation, teacher working conditions, teacher and principal labor markets. As part of the Initiative for Systemic Program Improvement through Research in Educational (INSPIRE) Leadership research collaborative team, her recent research explores the quality of leadership preparation programs and their impact on graduate learning and their leadership practices in schools.
 
She has published articles in journals such as Educational Administration Quarterly, American Journal of Education, Economics of Education Review, Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, Journal of Educational Administration, and Journal of Educational Finance. She was a 2012-2013 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer postdoctoral Fellow. In 2013, she received the William J. Davis Award for the most outstanding Educational Administration Quarterly article of the year. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education Policy and Master’s degree in Economics from Michigan State University.

Email Yongmei Ni at: yongmei.ni@utah.edu

Jesse Rothstein is Associate Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.   His research focuses on education and tax policy, and particularly on the way that public institutions ameliorate or reinforce the effects of children’s families on their academic and economic outcomes. His recent work includes studies of the evaluation of teacher quality using student achievement data; the design of incentive compensation contracts for teachers; the role of family income in the black-white test score gap; and the effects of unemployment insurance on job search.  His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, among other outlets. He has a Ph.D. in economics and a Masters in Public Policy, both from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Email Jesse Rothstein at: rothstein@berkeley.edu

Kenneth Saltman is a Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago. His interests include the political economy and cultural politics of public school privatization. His work also explains how the privatization movement in education is part of the broader movement to undermine public democratic power and expand global corporate power.

He is the author and editor of numerous books on educational policy and politics including Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy, The Edison Schools, Education as Enforcement: the Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, The Failure of Corporate School Reform, The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction, and Toward a New Common School Movement.  His most recent book (2016) is Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education.

Email Kenneth Saltman at: ksaltman@uic.edu 

Carrie Sampson, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University. Her scholarship focuses on how educational leadership and policymaking at the K-12 level influences equity and social justice for minoritized youth and their families. Dr. Sampson has conducted research on school desegregation policies. Her most recent line of research is centered at the school district level with an emphasis on governance, particularly the role of school boards, community advocacy, decentralization, and school choice policies. Her methodological expertise is in case study and qualitative methods. Dr. Sampson’s research on school boards was recently funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Email Carrie Sampson at: csampso4@asu.edu

Ron Scapp is the founding director of the Graduate Program of Urban and Multicultural Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx where he is professor of humanities and teacher education. He is currently the director of program development at the College, and is President of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. He is also serving as a member of the International Committee for Kappa Delta Pi and a member of United Federation of Teachers policy board for the NYC Teachers Center.  He has written on a variety of topics—from popular culture to education, from social and political philosophy to art criticism. 

His recent books include, Managing to Be Different: Educational Leadership as Critical Practice (Routledge) and Living With Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture, co-edited with Brian Seitz (Palgrave Macmillan). He has collaborated with others on different projects, most notably with cultural critic and author bell hooks [sic]. He is currently working on a book about education and the culture of reform and is co-editor with Kenneth J. Saltman of the Routledge series, Positions: Education, Politics and Culture. He is editor of the journal Ethnic Studies Review, and is a founding member of Group Thought, a philosophy collective based in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Email Ron Scapp at: ron.scapp@mountsaintvincent.edu

Janelle Scott is a Professor and the Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities at the University of California at Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education, African American Studies Department, and Goldman School of Public Policy. She earned a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of California at Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Before earning her doctorate, she was a teacher in Oakland, California. 

Professor Scott’s research investigates how market-based educational reforms affect democratic accountability and equity in public education. She has explored this research program across several policy strands: 1) the racial politics of public education, 2) the politics of school choice, marketization, and privatization, 3) the politics of research evidence on market-oriented reforms, and, 4) the role of elite and community-based advocacy in shaping public education and research evidence utilization. Her work has appeared in several edited books and journals, including the Peabody Journal of Education, Educational Policy, Qualitative Inquiry, the American Educational Research Journal, and the Harvard Educational Review.

She was awarded a Spencer Dissertation Year Fellowship, and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2014, she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Committee on Scholars of Color.  In 2020, she was elected as an AERA Fellow. She is Vice President for Division L (Policy and Politics) of AERA (2019-2022). She is the editor of School choice and diversity: What the evidence says (2005 Teachers College Press), and, with Sonya Horsford and Gary Anderson, author of The Politics of Education in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for democratic schooling (2018 Routledge). 

Email Janelle T. Scott at: jtscott@berkeley.edu

Tina Trujillo is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA and her M.A. in Education from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a former urban public school teacher, school reform consultant, and educational evaluator. Dr. Trujillo uses tools from political science and critical policy studies to study the political dimensions of urban district reform, the instructional and democratic consequences of high-stakes testing and accountability policies for students of color and English Learners, and trends in urban educational leadership. Her work is published in a range of journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, Journal of Educational Administration, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She is the co-editor of Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (2016, Information Age Publishing, with William Mathis).

Email Tina Trujillo at: trujillo@berkeley.edu