Janelle Scott

Janelle Scott 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.

Professor Scott’s research investigates how market-based educational reforms affect democratic accountability and equity in public education through examinations of 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.

She was awarded a Spencer Dissertation 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 has served as 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, which was honored with a 2020 American Educational Studies Association Critic’s Choice Award.