Diana Slaughter Kotzin

University of Pennsylvania

Constance E. Clayton Professor Emerita in Urban Education

Diana Slaughter Kotzin, PhD, has been Constance E. Clayton professor emerita in urban education of the University of Pennsylvania since July 2011. Her research interests included culture, primary education, and home-school relations facilitating in-school academic achievement. Before joining Penn in 1998, Slaughter taught for 20 years at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy (1977-97) and was on the faculties of the department of psychiatry at Howard University (1967-68), the Child Study Center at Yale University (1968-70), and the Committee on Human Development and department of education at the University of Chicago (1970-77). Sincere retirement, she has edited ”Black Educational Choice: Assessing the Private and Public Alternatives to K-12 Public Schools” with colleagues; ”Messages for Educational Leadership: The Constance E. Clayton Lectures, 1998-2007”; and ”Racial Stereotypes and Child Development”. She is presently writing a memoir about her career that spanned more than 40 years in academic and higher education, when she was primarily known as Diana Slaughter. She has bachelor’s (1962) and master’s degrees (1964) and a doctorate (1968) from the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago, where she specialized in development and clinical psychology. In 1969 her dissertation received a distinguished research award from Pi Lambda Theta. In June 2007, the University of Chicago awarded its Lifetime Professional Achievement Citation, and in 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Education. In 2018, Diana was presented the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who's Who. In 2019, the American Psychological Association designated her a "pioneer woman of color among the first to break into psychology's ranks." Diana was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022, as noted in her 2024 Wikipedia page.