The Lynch School of Education and Human Development is poised to become a policy powerhouse.
Scholars at the Lynch School have long conducted rigorous evaluations of educational programs and have subsequently partnered with policymakers to ensure their research leads to improvements in student outcomes.
To strengthen their impact and extend their reach, nationally recognized policy expert Stella M. Flores has joined the school’s faculty and is leading its new Education Policy Initiative, where faculty will work together to apply for funding, conduct research, host symposia, and build partnerships with policy organizations.
Flores believes the Lynch School—with its emphasis on ethics and social justice—is an ideal incubator for education policy: “We can create public policy to benefit the social good of the world,” she says, adding, “smart, efficient, and socially just policy. I’m really excited about that.”
Flores and five colleagues at the Lynch School, whose work has informed education policy at the local, state, and national levels, will be the initiative’s principal contributors. The initiative will also provide Lynch School faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars with opportunities to collaborate and form partnerships.
The Lynch School—with its emphasis on ethics and social justice—is an ideal incubator for education policy.
“We want the initiative to be application-focused,” says Associate Dean Ana Martínez-Alemán. While research itself is important, she adds, “implementation is the key factor here.”
The initiative’s first grant, from the Spencer Foundation, will fund a convening of Boston-area scholars to develop research and evaluation models that will innovate and succeed in an era of insecure data access and rapidly changing methods and technology.
Meet the team behind the new Education Policy Initiative:
Professor and John E. Cawthorne Millennium Chair, Educational Leadership and Higher Education
As a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Stella Flores coauthored a 2003 report demonstrating that percentage plans were not adequate alternatives to affirmative action in college admissions. The report received national attention and was cited in several amicus briefs in the Gratz v. Bollinger Supreme Court case.
Stella Flores
“That’s when it hit me that research evidence could play a role in public policy,” Flores says.
Since then, she has devoted her career to conducting rigorous research into interventions aimed at increasing equity in college admissions and college success, and she’s shared her expertise with congressional committees, at White House convenings, and with the Federal Reserve.
Flores recently completed a randomized controlled trial examining a scholarship program meant to increase enrollment of low-income students at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently evaluating the implementation of the federal GEAR UP program (which aims to improve college and career readiness among low-income students) across 12 Texas school districts and developing a book examining the interplay of housing, health care, technology, and the K–12 teacher labor force on college success for underserved students.
Professor and Department Chair, Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment
A former high school teacher and assistant principal, Shaun Dougherty uses economic theory and methods to estimate how education policies and programs influence outcomes. Much of his work focuses on programs designed to help youth navigate the transition to adulthood, with an emphasis on career and technical education (CTE).
Shaun Dougherty
As a former practitioner, Dougherty emphasizes the role of working in partnership with state and local education agencies to address practical challenges that are also of interest to researchers and policymakers. For example, his studies of Connecticut’s CTE high schools have demonstrated the schools’ substantial benefits for students. By comparing students just over the admissions threshold for Connecticut’s very popular CTE high schools to those just below the threshold, Dougherty found that attending CTE schools significantly improved graduation rates, employment rates, and earnings—especially for male and low-income students. After seeing the study results, Connecticut’s education department changed its CTE admissions practices, moving to a lottery-based system that provides more equitable access to these beneficial programs.
Dougherty also has a long-standing partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, evaluating its CTE programs and offering suggestions for improvement. Earlier this year, he issued a policy memo with specific recommendations for how Massachusetts can expand its CTE offerings, more equitably allocate seats for oversubscribed programs, and fill seats in undersubscribed ones.
Associate Professor, Education Leadership and Higher Education
Nearly 40 percent of students who enroll in college never receive a degree. Angela Boatman wants to improve those completion rates by better understanding the barriers—financial, social, and academic—college students face.
Angela Boatman
Much of her work focuses on improving developmental education (sometimes called “remedial” education) for students who aren’t academically prepared for college-level courses. Some of her prior research, which used data from community colleges and universities in Tennessee, showed the standard practice of placing students in stand-alone, non-credit developmental courses was less effective than enrolling them directly in college-level courses while providing extra tutoring and support. Over the past decade, this approach—known as “corequisite remediation”—has since become the norm in many states. Louisiana recently made the switch to corequisite remediation, and Boatman is currently partnering with the state’s Board of Regents, along with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, to evaluate that policy change.
Policy partnerships are key, she says: “If you are not connected in some way to the actual decision makers, often nothing changes. Partnering with state higher education agencies to identify issues facing their students and work toward meaningful, sustainable solutions has always been a primary goal of my research.”
Assistant Professor, Education Leadership and Higher Education
Earl Edwards, director of the Lynch School’s Housing & Education Equity Lab, published a report last year highlighting the ways Massachusetts charter schools potentially under-identified students experiencing homelessness and did not meet the federal requirements for public notice of their educational rights. Since then, he has formed a partnership with the Massachusetts Charter School Association that has led to better training for charter school leaders.
Earl Edwards
Edwards is also helping to create an education and housing coalition in Brockton, a Massachusetts city with high poverty rates. The coalition is connecting school administrators with members of Brockton’s homeless response system and representatives from its youth services sectors (YMCA, Boys & Girls Clubs, et al.) so that they can work together to support vulnerable students.
On a national level, Edwards has served on an advisory committee that compiles the Annual Homeless Assessment Report, which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last submitted to Congress in December. “I’ve been pushing for student homelessness and data related to how students are doing to be a part of that report,” he says, because he believes it’s crucial that advocates for the homeless include students and schools in their planning and policies.
Professor, Education Leadership and Higher Education
Immigrant students are often characterized by what they can’t do (speak fluent English, for example). But as a middle-school teacher in Boston, Rebecca Lowenhaupt was struck by her immigrant students’ many strengths and interested in how educators could help these students succeed.
Rebecca Lowenhaupt
Today, Lowenhaupt studies school- and district-level policies that support immigrant students and their families. When anti-immigrant sentiment began rising in the United States in the mid-2010s, she studied how schools responded and documented best practices for supporting immigrant students—such as connecting their families with community resources, providing immigrant-rights training for teachers and other educators, and explicitly communicating that all students are respected and welcome at their schools. The study reflects Lowenhaupt’s long-standing interest in the role principals and other school leaders play in supporting culturally diverse students. Her engagement with school, district and state leaders has focused on policymaking across levels of the education system.
Lowenhaupt has recently become interested in cross-sector initiatives and the role of youth-serving institutions outside of schools and how their policies intersect with education policies. For the past four years, she has helped facilitate collaboration across sectors as a member of the Chelsea Children’s Cabinet, which includes school district leaders, city officials and directors of community clinics and after-school programs. Led by the public school superintendent and other community leaders, the cabinet was established in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb with a large immigrant population, to develop local policies and coordinate efforts to improve youth well-being after the COVID-19 pandemic. The cabinet’s successes include partnering with the local Boys & Girls Club and forging partnerships to increase mental health services offered in Chelsea schools.
Associate Professor, Educational Leadership and Higher Education, Lynch School; Associate Professor (courtesy), BC Law School
Raquel Muñiz
Raquel Muñiz, an attorney who earned a Ph.D. in educational theory and policy, is interested in how law and policy shape education equity. In 2023, in a policy brief on 504 Plans, she made recommendations for ensuring that federal laws intended to protect disabled students don’t just benefit affluent families who can afford lawyers and medical evaluations. Several of her recommendations were included the following year in a position statement on 504 Plans issued by the American School Counselor Association.
Muñiz also examines the ways knowledge, including research, informs law and policy in furtherance of education equity. Last year, she published an analysis of the sources Supreme Court justices cited in their 2023 decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions. She found the Court made 137 citations to extralegal sources, which provide context but carry no legal authority, and only three were to educational peer-reviewed research. One takeaway from this analysis, according to Muñiz, is that education researchers should expand where they publish so their work reaches other audiences. “And institutions could incentivize this behavior,” she suggests, “by expanding what counts and what they value in tenure and promotion evaluations.”
In addition to the faculty specifically collaborating on the Education Policy Initiative, the Lynch School also counts among its experts:
Boisi Professor of Education and Public Policy and Education Research, Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment
Henry Braun
Henry Braun’s work focuses on the application of quantitative methods to the understanding and evaluation of education policies, assessment and accountability, international assessment surveys, the structure of opportunity, and the outcomes of liberal education. He is director of Boston College’s Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy (CSTEEP).
Professor and Florencia and Marc Gabelli Family Faculty Fellow, Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Rebekah Levine Coley
Rebekah Levine Coley’s work lies at the intersection of child development, social and educational policy, and poverty. Her expertise includes assessing and counteracting economic, social, and racial inequities in mental and behavioral health and educational and economic attainment. She directs the cross-disciplinary Center for Child and Family Policy.