NEPC Topic Experts on Privatization

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 K. Barbour, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Instructional Design for the College of Education and Health Sciences at Touro University California. He has been involved with K-12 distance, online, and blended learning for over two decades as a researcher, evaluator, teacher, course designer, and administrator. Michael’s research has focused on the effective design, delivery, and support of K-12 distance, online, and blended learning, particularly for students located in rural jurisdictions. This focus includes how regulation, governance, and policy can impact effective distance, online, and blended learning environments. His background and expertise has resulted in invitations to testify before legislative committees and provide expert testimony on legal cases in several states, across Canada, and in New Zealand.  Additionally, he has also consulted on projects in Australia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden.

Email Michael Barbour at: mkbarbour@gmail.com

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

T. Jameson Brewer Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of North Georgia. His teaching experience spans the middle school, high school, undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. Broadly conceptualized, his research focuses on the impact of privatization and marketization of public education by way of school vouchers, charter schools, alternative teacher certification, homeschooling, and venture philanthropy. Follow him on Twitter: @tjamesonbrewer

Email T. Jameson Brewer at: jameson.brewer@ung.edu

Joshua Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and, for the 2024-25 academic year, Senior Fellow at the Education Law Center. He has been studying vouchers and other school choice programs since 2005. He has also partnered with state agencies, legislatures and other organizations on evaluations of a variety of education policies related to student development and teacher retention. Over the last two years, Cowen has written, testified and spoken widely on the harmful effects of voucher programs. His work has appeared in outlets like the Brookings Institution Chalkboard, Time Magazine, the Hechinger Report, the Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Josh Cowen’s new book, The Privateers (Harvard Education Press: September 2024), is an inside look at voucher policymaking within the broader culture war battles.

Email Josh Cowen at jcowen@msu.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

Julian Vasquez Heilig is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Western Michigan University. His research and practice are primarily focused on K-12 and higher education curriculum, policy, and leadership that impacts equity and innovation. He was recently selected as a recipient of the 2022 Linda C. Tillman Social & Racial Justice Award— which recognizes an academic who demonstrates outstanding leadership in furthering the values of “diversity, equity, and social justice in PK-20 educational organizations.” He obtained his Ph.D. in Education Administration and Policy Analysis and a Masters in Sociology from Stanford University. He also holds a Masters of Higher Education and a Bachelor’s of History and Psychology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Email Julian Vasquez Heilig at: j.vasquezheilig@wmich.edu

Luis A. Huerta is an associate professor of education and public policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research and scholarship focus on issues of decentralization related to school choice reforms, as well as the impact of school finance inequities on implementing school reform. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Email Luis A. Huerta at: lah2013@tc.columbia.edu

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

Robert Kim is the Executive Director of Education Law Center, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving public education and fostering equitable educational opportunity for students in the United States. His expertise includes most facets of education law and policy related to pre-K-12 and postsecondary education in the United States, civil rights litigation and advocacy, and constitutional law.

Email Robert Kim at: robertkimnyc@gmail.com

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

Gordon Lafer is a political economist and a Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. He has written widely on issues of labor and employment policy, and his most recent book is The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America, One State at a Time (Cornell University Press, 2017).  Lafer has served as an economic policy analyst for the Office of the Mayor in New York City and has testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and state legislatures. Lafer is the founding co-chair of the American Political Science Association’s Labor Project, and has taught as a visiting faculty member at the University of Massachusetts’ Union Leadership Academy and at the Universidad Latina de America in Michoacan, Mexico. In 2009–2010, Lafer took leave from his faculty position to serve as Senior Labor Policy Advisor for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. In 2011, he became a Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. In 2019, Lafer was elected to the school board in Eugene, Oregon.

Email Gordon Lafer at: glafer@msn.com

Jaekyung Lee, PhD, is a professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A fellow of the prestigious American Educational Research Association (AERA), Lee is an internationally recognized leader in educational policy, accountability and equity, and international and comparative education. He has a PhD in education from the University of Chicago. Lee is currently a Richard P. Nathan Fellow of the Rockefeller Institute of Government. He was also a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a fellow of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the recipient of 2007 AERA Raymond B. Cattell Early Career Award and 2015 Western New York Educational Service Council Robert W. Heller Award. Lee is the author of "The Anatomy of Achievement Gaps: Why and How American Education is Losing (But Can Still Win) the War on Underachievement" (Oxford University Press).

Email Jaekyung Lee at: jl224@buffalo.edu

Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor, Emeritus of Economics and Education and Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education. He is also the David Jacks Professor of Higher Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University where he served on the faculty for 31 years with a joint appointment in the School of Education and Department of Economics. Levin is the Founding Director of the Accelerated Schools Project, a national school reform that reached about 1,000 schools in 41 states and Hong Kong. He is also on the Board of the African Diaspora Consortium, an organization focused on research and status of populations of African descent in non-African countries.

Levin has been a Fulbright scholar in Barcelona and in Mexico, Visiting Professor at Beijing University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. He has also been the President of the Palo Alto, California School Board and the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, and is the author of about 300 articles, and author or editor of 20 books.

Email Henry Levin at: levin@exchange.tc.columbia.edu

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

Bryan Mann is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas, and Director of the Center for Geography of Education Policy. He holds a PhD in Educational Theory and Policy from the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on geography and educational policy, exploring key questions about school enrollment trends and policy mechanisms that enhance educational and social equity. Dr. Mann's work spans areas such as segregation and diversity, school choice, and alternative education models. Notably, his studies have shed light on trends related to rural segregation in Alabama, the impact of gentrification on education in Washington DC, and the geospatial patterns of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania. Prior to his role at the University of Kansas, Dr. Mann was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a high school English teacher in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Email Bryan Mann at: bryanmann@ku.edu

Roxana Marachi is Professor of Education at San José State University, where she teaches courses in the Department of Teacher Education and the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. She received a PhD in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan in 2003, where she studied the impacts of learning environments on student motivation and behavior in schools and conducted reviews of evaluation research in the fields of school violence prevention and social emotional learning. Her current research interests are focused on strengthening systemic strategies for the prevention of data harms and bridging research-to-practice gaps in the integration of emerging technologies in education.

Email Roxana Marachi at: roxana.marachi@sjsu.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

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 

Jack Schneider, Ph.D., the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a historian and policy analyst who studies the influence of politics, rhetoric, culture, and information in shaping attitudes and behaviors. His research examines how educators, policymakers, and the public develop particular views about what is true, what is effective, and what is important. Drawing on a diverse mix of methodological approaches, he has written about measurement and accountability, segregation and school choice, teacher preparation and pedagogy, and the relationship between research and practice. His current work, on how school quality is conceptualized and quantified, has been supported by the Spencer Foundation and the Massachusetts State Legislature. The author of four books, Schneider is a regular contributor to outlets like the Washington Post and the Atlantic, and co-hosts the education policy podcast Have You Heard. He is also the co-founder and Director of Research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment.

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

Professor Kevin Welner teaches educational policy and law at the CU Boulder School of Education. He’s also the director of the National Education Policy Center, which works to build bridges between the research world and the broader public. Kevin has authored or edited a dozen books and more than 100 articles and book chapters, including a casebook for law school students about education law, and a book called Closing the Opportunity Gap, which is the foundation for his recent work about the importance of improving children’s opportunities to learn inside and outside of school, including the Price of Opportunity Project. Welner has been recognized by the American Educational Research Association as a Fellow and been given the AERA's Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award (in 2017), Early Career Award (in 2006), Palmer O. Johnson Award (best article in 2004). The Horace Mann League gave Welner its Outstanding Public Educator Award in 2018. He received his B.A. in Biological Sciences from UCSB and his J.D. and Ph.D. from UCLA.

Email Kevin G. Welner at: kevin.welner@colorado.edu