By Jenna Somers
Two scholars at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development were awarded prestigious early-career fellowships from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, while a Peabody doctoral student received a valuable fellowship to support her dissertation work
Mark Chin, assistant professor of leadership, policy and organizations, and Andres Pinedo, assistant professor of human and organizational development, received NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowships to lead respective studies on the financial impacts of school choice policies and on the underlying connection between high school ethnic studies courses and positive student outcomes.
Nicollette Mitchell, a doctoral student in the Department of Teaching and Learning, received the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship to investigate how the post-secondary geoscience educational experiences of Black women geoscientists influence their persistence in that scientific field.
The financial effects of school choice policies
Chin's fellowship will support his study on whether school choice policies affect people's preferences regarding taxation and spending, including spending on education or for other services. He plans to offer the first causal evidence for the effects of school choice policies on voter attitudes and public finance by examining data from Indiana on public school outcomes, expressed voter preferences, and the finances of municipal governments.
In 2011, Indiana implemented a school choice voucher program that has continued to expand. The state also has allowed more charter school authorizers, leading to the growth of charter schools.
"The privatization or marketization of education, mainly through statewide school voucher programs and the expansion of charter schools, may decrease community enthusiasm for public services and the tax policies that fund them because people may see these services-in particular, education-as individual goods more than public goods," Chin said. "These attitudes may then weaken the fiscal health of school districts and other municipal governments because voters may vote against tax policies to finance these services."
For example, Chin says, in Indiana, school districts can ask voters to vote on referenda to fund schools beyond per-pupil state funding. Chin is analyzing a dataset he created on where and when these referenda pass to gauge the populations' support for schooling as a public good. To situate this information in a wider context, Chin is also analyzing data from Harvard University's Cooperative Election Survey on Hoosiers' opinions about taxation and spending for public services.
"So, there are two measures: one is focused on whether people say they support taxation versus cutting social programs. The other is, regardless of what people say, what does actual voting behavior look like when these referenda come up for a vote? In places where choice has expanded the most-where voters are saying they want more taxes-are they also voting for more taxes?"
The attitudinal changes of the electorate in viewing education as an individual good, rather than a public one, can have negative impacts on education access. If public schools lose funding, they may lack resources and eventually close, leaving families who can't afford another schooling option, even with a voucher, without access to education.
Why do ethnic studies courses benefit student academic achievement?
According to Pinedo, recent studies have shown that high school students enrolled in ethnic studies courses improve their academic performance, including achieving higher grades, higher graduation rates, and being more likely to attend college. Pinedo suggests that these courses help students develop critical consciousness-the ability to analyze and respond to social inequality-and a positive sense of their ethnic and cultural identities, which may play key roles in promoting academic achievement. Ethnic studies courses support healthy identity development by challenging negative stereotypes.
Improved student confidence may motivate academic achievement as well as community involvement. Pinedo is collaborating with schools across California-from urban to rural communities-that offer ethnic studies courses to study their effects. Additionally, he is examining whether students' access to school- and community-level resources, such as advocacy groups and organizations, factor into their levels of academic success.
"At the end of the day, we all want to improve student academic success," Pinedo said. "Given that ethnic studies courses are politically contentious, yet have a positive impact on student academic achievement, it is important, now more than ever, to understand why these courses have benefited students and to bring rigorous research to these debates."
Learning from the experiences of Black women geoscientists
While pursuing her master's degree in geoscience, Mitchell says colleagues often wondered how she got into the field; she is, after all, a Black woman in the least racially diverse scientific field.
Mitchell's experience in geoscience education piqued her curiosity about race and gender within the field. She recognized a need for educational research that informed efforts to diversify geoscience as well as broader STEM fields and support marginalized student populations in the sciences. So, she came to Vanderbilt to connect her passion for STEM education, Black studies, and creating environments of belonging to address this need.
In her dissertation, Mitchell is examining Black women geoscientists' experiences in post-secondary geoscience environments, and how features of postsecondary geoscience education influence Black women's persistence in the field. "I'm excited to be a part of a long tradition of scholars who are thinking about education in rigorous ways," Mitchell said. "The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship is a continuation of seeds sown in me by my department and the people within this department who were also NAEd/Spencer Fellows. It's like I've been welcomed into a family within a family."
