NEPC Topic Experts on Tracking and Detracking

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

Carol Corbett Burris became Executive Director of the Network for Public Education Foundation in August 2015, after serving as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in NY since 2000.  Prior to becoming a principal, she was a teacher at both the middle and high school level.  She received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her dissertation, which studied her district’s detracking reform in math, received the 2003 National Association of Secondary Schools’ Principals Middle Level Dissertation of the Year Award.  In 2010, she was named Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, she was named SAANYS New York State High School Principal of the Year.  Dr. Burris co-authored Detracking for Excellence and Equity (2008) and Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness (2012), and authored On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the 21st Century Struggle against Re-segregation (2014). Her articles have appeared in Educational Leadership, Kappan, American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Theory into Practice, School Administrator, American School Board Journal and Education Week. She regularly expresses her concerns about the misuse and unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in the Washington Post, The Answer Sheet blog.

E-mail Carol Burris at: burriscarol@gmail.com

Emily M. Hodge (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her work uses qualitative methods and social network analysis to understand decision-making about education policy, with the goals of improving the equitable distribution of high-quality learning opportunities and the status of teaching as a profession. Recent projects have explored how teachers negotiated the tension between standardization and differentiation in the context of the Common Core State Standards and the varied strategies state education agencies are using to support standards implementation. Hodge is a recipient of a Small Research Grant and a Conference Grant from the Spencer Foundation. She is the Co-Editor of the American Journal of Education. Her research appears in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy, Review of Research in Education, and AERA Open, among others. 

Email Emily Hodge at: hodgee@mail.montclair.edu

Linda Molner Kelley, co-director of the Schools of Opportunity project and co-editor of the book Schools of Opportunity: 10 Research-Based Models of Equity in Action, is the former Assistant Dean of Teacher Education and Partnerships and former Director for Outreach and Engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder. In those and other roles, she has developed numerous K-16 and community programs designed to strengthen learning opportunities for students and teachers in diverse settings. A former high school teacher and administrator in a Denver school district, Linda is a champion of high-quality induction programs for novice teachers, research-based professional development opportunities for practicing teachers, and the creation of mutually beneficial partnerships among K-12 schools, higher education and local communities.

Email Linda Molner Kelley at: Linda.Molner@colorado.edu

Daniel J. Losen, J.D., M.Ed., is Director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA's Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. He has worked at the CRP since 1999, when it was affiliated with Harvard Law School, where he has also been a lecturer on law. His work concerns the impact of federal, state and local education law and policy on students of color. On these and related topics he: conducts law and policy research; publishes books, reports, and articles; has testified before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations; helps draft model legislation; and provides guidance to policymakers, educators and civil rights advocates. His most recent efforts have focused on addressing the school to prison pipeline.  in January 2012, CCRR’s national conference called Closing the School Discipline Gap: Research to Practice, featured new research on remedies from leading scholars from across the nation. In 2014 Losen will be working with Teachers’College Press to publish a book based on this new research. As the Director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, he has recently published several (co-authored) research and policy studies including:  Out of School and Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools, (April, 2013) with Tia Martinez and Eliminating Excessive and Unfair Exclusionary Discipline in Schools Policy Recommendations for Reducing Disparities (March 2014) with Damon Hewitt and Ivory Toldson, on behalf of the Disparities in Discipline Research Collaborative.  As an independent consultant Losen also has extensive experience working with states and large districts across the nation. Before attending law school, Losen taught public school for 10 years and was a founding member of a public alternative school.

Find data on disparities in discipline and links to CCRR's new research at this webtool developed by CCRR: www.schooldisciplinedata.org.

Email Daniel J. Losen at: losendan@gmail.com                     

Beth C. Rubin, Ph.D. is professor of education at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. In her work, she uses a critical, sociocultural approach to investigate how young people develop, both as learners and as citizens, amid the interwoven contexts of classroom, school, and community, with particular attention to the ways that these settings are shaped by historical and structural inequalities. Her work appears in a variety of journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, the Harvard Educational Review, Curriculum Inquiry, Equity and Excellence in Education, the Urban Review, and others. Her most recent book is Making Citizens: Transforming Civic Learning for Diverse Social Studies Classrooms (Routledge, 2012).

Email Beth Rubin at: beth.rubin@gse.rutgers.edu

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21^st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).

Email P.L. Thomas at: paul.thomas@furman.edu

Karolyn Tyson is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. Her main fields of interest are sociology of education, social psychology, and social inequality. Dr. Tyson's publications have addressed such topics as how schools reproduce social inequality and the role of the schooling experience in the development of attitudes toward school. Her overall program of research centers on understanding how cultural, structural, and individual-level factors affect school achievement and contribute to unequal educational outcomes.

Email Karolyn Tyson at: kt801@georgetown.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