Spring 2025 Ed Policy Seminar Series
January 28, 2025 @ 3:00 pm - April 15, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
WHEELOCK EDUCATIONAL POLICY CENTER SPRING SEMINAR 2025
Boston University’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and The Wheelock Educational Policy Center are excited to host three leading scholars this spring for a Ed Policy Seminar Series. Given growing interest in our local community and increased prominence of presenters, we’re happy to open this speaker series to individuals outside of the BU faculty and students typically in attendance.
All are welcome. The seminar series is geared towards an academic audience and will include detailed and technical discussion about methods used in the research, in addition to the policy context and implications.
Register for one or all. Events are in-person. Reception to follow. Space is limited, please RSVP.
If you require parking or other logistics support, please email the Wheelock Policy team.
Constance Lindsay (University of North Carolina): Tuesday, January 28th, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Bio: Lindsay earned a doctorate in human development and social policy from Northwestern University, where she was an Institute of Education Sciences’ predoctoral fellow. Since leaving Northwestern, Lindsay has worked in education policy in various contexts, applying her research training in traditional studies and in creating and evaluating new systems and policies regarding teachers. Lindsay’s areas of expertise include teacher quality and diversity, analyzing and closing racial achievement gaps, and adolescent development. Her work has been published in such journals as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Social Science Research. Lindsay received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University and master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University. Before doctoral study at Northwestern, she was a Presidential Management Fellow at the US Department of Education. Constance Lindsay’s research focuses on policies and practices to close racial achievement gaps in education. Currently, her main focus is on teacher diversity and how to obtain a high quality, diverse educator workforce.
Catherine Voulgarides (Hunter College): Tuesday, March 18th, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Bio: My work engages with the social, political, and historical conditions that impact educators across the educational ecosystem to identify more effective and equitable policy and legal solutions for long standing inequities. I have expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research approaches. Using these methods, I seek to understand the equity issues that arise at the intersection of educational policy and law, organizational contexts, and educator interpretation and implementation dynamics—with a focus on special education policy. My research agenda builds from a central question that I have been asking since I entered the classroom as a K-12 teacher and which I explored as a doctoral student. The question became half of the title for my book published by Teachers College Press in 2018 entitled Does Compliance Matter? IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice, which won the best publication award by the American Sociological Association (ASA) Disability and Society Section. The book, based on my dissertation, was a comparative ethnographic study focused on understanding the relationship between racial disproportionality in special education and policy compliance across contexts. To date, I continue to ask “does compliance matter?” in more sophisticated and nuanced ways. My work has been funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Education Research Service Project program, and CUNY Hunter College. I have published numerous peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. I have also served in various leadership roles for national educational organizations.
Mark Chin (Vanderbilt University): Tuesday, April 15th, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
I am an Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Inequality in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.
I study how public education in the U.S. can help combat racial and socioeconomic inequality. In my research, I draw on the economics of education, psychology, and sociology literatures and use rigorous quantitative methodology to identify the causal impacts of different policies, programs, and interventions in schools on students’ outcomes. My current projects focus on school integration, school choice, racial bias in education, and how schools support the development of antiracist youth.
I received my Ph.D. in Education with a concentration in Education Policy and Program Evaluation from Harvard University in 2022.