Douglas S. Reed is a Professor of Government and Director of the MA Program in Educational Transformation at Georgetown University. He teaches and writes about education politics and policy-making, as well as civil rights. His interests include education reform, equality in education, and the nature of educational governance. His new book, co-authored with Gregory Hutchings, Jr., is of Getting into Good Trouble at School. He is also the author of Building the Federal Schoolhouse, (Oxford University Press) and On Equal Terms: The Constitutional Politics of Education (Princeton University Press).
New Book!
Getting Into Good Trouble at School
co-Authored with Gregory C.Hutchings, Jr.
A guidebook for building an antiracist school, Getting into Good Trouble At School combines extensive, practical experience in schools and a solid research base to provide actors within schools concrete steps needed to dismantle racist policies and practices, practices that for decades have kept students of color from experiencing the same success as their white counterparts.
Stakeholders of all kinds — superintendents, principals, school board members, parents and teachers — can use the six steps described in this book to reimagine educational equity, actively dismantle institutional racism, and implement strategic, methodical policies that benefit the entire school community. Racism isn’t always intentional. Antiracism, on the other hand, must be. Now antiracist education leaders can put their intentions into action—and grant the promise of an equitable and culturally rich education to all students.
Edited Volume
Elementary and Secondary Education Act at 50 and Beyond:
This issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, co-edited by myself, Katie McDermott and David Gamson, brings together political scientists, historians, policy scholars, economists, and sociologists to understand how changes in political institutions, the economy and social contexts have shaped the ability of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to redress poverty through the expansion of educational opportunity.
Current Projects
I am currently working on a range of projects, predominantly focused on the politics of education and the organizational changes needed to achieve lasting and just education reform.
Project ELEECT
I am the Principal Investigator on Project ELEECT, a $2.6 million dollar federal grant to the MA Program in Educational Transformation, to provide both professional development to existing teachers in DC Public Schools and charters to develop strategies and capacity to work with emergent bilingual students in K-12 education in DC, as well as provide scholarships to teacher candidates in our MA-based teacher preparation program. Click here for more information, or to be a part of Project ELEECT.
The Color-Conscious Classroom
This book project builds on an earlier article I wrote on Plessy v. Ferguson and the rise of color-blindness as a conservative judicial and educational strategy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. The aim of this book is to develop a theory of equal protection jurisprudence that both recognizes the empirical data that race consciousness in the classroom can, if linked to student identities, benefit learners and breaks us out of the policy paralysis of colorblindness.
Selected Earlier Works
Building the Federal Schoolhouse: Localism and the American Education State
This book explores how federal educational policy initiatives intersect with the long-standing commitments to localism in American education. It argues that the "education state" that has been built over the past 50 years of federal reform efforts is the product of persistent clashes between local political commitments and federal ambitions.
On Equal Terms: The Constitutional Politics of Educational Opportunity
This book examines the effects and politics of state constitutional litigation campaigns to equalize educational resources and the political reactions to state supreme court decisions striking down school finance plans.
Popular Constitutionalism: Toward a Theory of State Constitutional Meanings
This article explores the fluid and dynamic nature of state constitutional meanings and how political re-definitions of those meanings provide insights into the nature of constitutional commitments. It explores these issues in the context of state constitutional battles over gay marriage and state initiative campaigns against gay rights
Announcing:
My new venture is Rose Hill Education Associates an educational equity consulting firm that works with K-12 and higher education to advance racial and school finance equity. Rooted in evidence-based analysis, Rose Hill Education Associates focuses on helping stakeholders commit to equity, in multiple dimensions, working to develop the racial literacy needed to engage diverse students and families within communities and the racial fluency to address both structural and interpersonal dimensions of equity. Please contact me at rosehilleduc@gmail.com for additional information
MA Program in Educational Transformation
I am the founding director of Georgetown’s MA Program in Educational Transformational, which launched in 2017 to train both teacher candidates and advocacy and policy professionals working in the education space. Our goal is to provide students with the skills to transform existing educational settings in to rich learning environments. We take an explicitly anti-racist stance as we advance an asset-based stance towards students, families and communities. We are centered on equity — racial, class, linguistic and students with disabilities — and we anchor our own students learning in experiential contexts that enables them to apply their academic training on a daily basis — whether in a K-12 classroom or in the advocacy or policy environment. To find out more about the MA in Educational Transformation at Georgetown, click here.