Jeannie Oakes

Jeannie Oakes is Director of Educational Equity and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation in New York.  Until Fall 2008, she was Presidential Professor in Educational Equity at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where she directed UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access and the University of California’s All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity.  Jeannie Oakes’s own scholarship examines the impact of social policies on the educational opportunities and outcomes of low-income students of color.  She is the author of twenty scholarly books and monographs and more than 125 journal articles, book chapters, and research reports.  Her book, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (Yale University Press) has been honored as one of the twentieth century’s most influential books on education and an updated 20^th anniversary edition was released in 2005.  A second book, Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform, won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award.  Oakes has received three other major awards from the American Educational Research Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Educational Research Association, the Multicultural Research Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America. She is also the recipient of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Ralph David Abernathy Award for Public Service and the World Cultural Council’s Jose Vasconcelos World Award in Education.  Professor Oakes is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education.  She is also President-Elect of the American Educational Research Association.