Kevin Welner

University of Colorado Boulder

Research Professor and Director of the National Education Policy Center

Kevin Welner is a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, specializing in educational policy. He's also the director of the National Education Policy Center, housed at CU Boulder. His research interests include the intersection of education rights litigation and educational opportunity scholarship, the change process associated with equity-minded reform efforts, private-school vouchers, charter-school access, detracking, and the use and misuse of research in policy making. His latest books are Education and the law (2024, with Robert Kim), The school voucher illusion: Exposing the pretense of equity (2023, co-edited with Gary Orfield and Luis Huerta), Schools of opportunity: 10 research-based models of equity in action (2023, co-edited with Adam York and Linda Molner-Kelley), School's choice: How charter schools control access and shape enrollment (2021, with Wagma Mommandi), and Potential grizzlies: Making the nonsense bearable (2021), as well as Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give every child an even chance (2013) co-edited with Dr. Prudence Carter. Welner is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a Senior Fellow of the Learning Policy Institute. He 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. Welner obtained his PhD and JD from UCLA.