NEPC Topic Experts on Education Management Organizations

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, Columbia Journalism Review, and Political Science Quarterly, 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: sam.abrams@colorado.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

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

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

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

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

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