Professional Biography
Leah L. Jones is a postdoctoral fellow in the Education Policy Division at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn, Dr. Jones earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in the department of sociology and demography. In 2018 she was named the Richard Stillwell and Agnes Newhall Stillwell Fellow at Princeton and held a predoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in sociology and the Populations Study Center.
Dr. Jones is a former middle school and high school math teacher. She taught in urban school districts for seven years, and during this time, she developed a commitment and passion for improving the academic outcomes of marginalized groups. Her research interests focus on the politics of education, education inequality, neighborhoods, race and ethnicity, and public policy. Specifically, her work examines how the political preferences of individuals and communities can affect the educational outcomes of racial and ethnic minority students.
Can the political leanings of communities and educators impact students' educational advancement, and thus perpetuate inequality? Dr. Jones' current book project, Assessing Ideologies, Spatial Polity, and Politics in Education, examines how partisanship is associated with educational inequality. This timely and relevant book explores the far-reaching ramifications of the impact society's political leanings can have on racial and ethnic minority students' educational outcomes and expands our understanding of potential mechanisms that can facilitate or hinder racial inequality in educational institutions.
To assess the political influence, the overall research uses an original experimental data set of teachers and other educators and also creates the first national assessment of the political landscape of school districts across the country using voter registration counts of over 185 million registered voters. This research argues that the ideological school spaces have real consequences that shape our children's future. At the individual level, teachers and other educators exhibit a racial bias that cuts along partisan lines. At the community level, the voting preferences of citizens living in a school district are associated with minority students' educational outcomes, such as AP course taking and punitive discipline rates, as well as the financial budgets of local school districts.
The theoretical importance of this work lies in extending our understanding of racial inequality and discovering potential new barriers to racial minorities' upward mobility. This work has been supported by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Western Social Science Association.
