Ja’Nya is a second year PhD student in the Education Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster. She is a proud East Coast native, raised in the “DMV”: DC, Maryland, Virginia region. She started her career as a Special Education Teacher and case manager, eventually transitioning into roles around youth mentorship, and race and identity facilitation for educators.
As a practitioner and researcher she is interested in understanding communal ties amongst school based stakeholders (parents, students and teachers) during the plight of policy shifts. She looks at opportunities for shift in...
Travis J. Bristol is an associate professor of teacher education and education policy at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Education. Before joining Berkeley's faculty, he was a Peter Paul Assistant Professor at Boston University. Using qualitative methods, Dr. Bristol explores three related research strands: (1) the role of educational policies in shaping teacher workplace experiences and retention; (2) district and school-based professional learning communities; (3) the role of race and gender in educational settings....
Tolani Britton uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Recent work explores whether the disproportionate increase in incarceration of Black males for drug possessions and manufacture increased gaps in college enrollment rates by race and gender over two time periods- after the passage of the Anti-Drug Act from 1986 - 1993 and after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act from 1995 - 2000.
Emily Reich (she/her) is a first-year doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. She comes to graduate school with questions about the ways in which bureaucracy and the school staff who wield it shape the educational lives of marginalized and minitoritized students.
Emily received a BS in Special Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. She holds credentials to teach Special Education to students in kindergarten through age twenty-one in California and Wisconsin. Before coming to Berkeley, Emily spent many...
Eric Assan (He/Him) is a 1st year Master's degree student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Applied Data Science. He is an awardee of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, a fully funded scholarship program for African students and the first Education student to be awarded this scholarship. Prior to joining the BSE, Eric received an MEd in Educational Management from Huzhou University, China in 2022 and graduated with a Bachelor's of Social Sciences Education at the University of Cape Coast...
Hoyun Kim is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the School of Education. Her research interests lie in the experiences of students in higher education and examining postsecondary institutions as organizations: topics pertaining to student agency, equity, accessibility of higher education, and the behavior and incentives of postsecondary institutions. More broadly, she aims to understand and reason the purpose and power of higher education through her work.
Her interests are informed by her experiences attending different forms of public schools in the...
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist, delves into how institutions, large and small, attempt to lift the learning and growth of children, including why they often fall short.
This implicates surrounding ideologies and politics that move organizations to do better. His new book -- When Schools Work-- delves into why student achievement climbed for nearly two decades in Los Angeles, and how a colorful quilt of civic activists powered a variety of reforms. The...
Janelle Scott (she/her) is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Education and African American Studies Department. She holds the Robert J. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities, and is the Chair of the Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy Cluster of the Othering and Belonging Institute. She is the Associate Dean for Students in the College of Letters and Science. Scott earned a PhD in Education Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and a BA in...
Rachel Williams is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores the linkages between the political economy, segregation, education policy, and Black politics. Her dissertation utilizes qualitative and spatial methods to examine the contemporary processes that reconfigure racial injustice under new terms at the intersection of public policy domains – housing, education, district fragmentation. Rachel examines charter growth in relationship to new modes of segregation, such as predatory housing policies and county secession, while...
María Rojas is a Chilean PhD candidate at the School of Education at UC Berkeley. In Chile, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in journalism and worked as a journalist for international affairs at CNN Chile. She became interested in specializing in education after working for two years as a Spanish Language Art teacher in a public high school in Santiago. After that experience, she came to the United States with a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her Masters’ degree in Education Policy at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Currently, María’s research aims to understand how the...