Jeannie Oakes University of California, Los Angeles This citation is awarded in honor of Dr. Oakes’s unwavering commitment to conducting cutting-edge research on issues of race and social justice. Her quantitative and qualitative analyses of inequalities within the educational system—from tracking to resource allocation, to student access, to high-quality teaching—critically examine not only the effects of such inequalities, but also the underlying assumptions that rationalize them. Never satisfied to simply study what is, Dr. Oakes, working in partnership with other researchers, educators, and community activists, has sought to build on the knowledge generated in her research to change the world. Thus, in addition to publishing award-winning books and articles, Dr. Oakes has played a critical role in fighting for better, more culturally relevant teacher education programs and more inclusive and just education policies. She is the founder and former director of both UCLA’s Center X Teacher Education Program and the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA), which utilizes research to confront the most pressing public issues in California by bringing people together across divided communities to address the critical problems of public education. Indeed, through her many leadership roles in higher education and the Ford Foundation, Dr. Oakes has helped to realize much of the needed change called for in the research evidence. Upon her appointment by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences in 2016, Oakes noted, “The education system has a great deal to contribute to a more racially just society, and I will be interested in encouraging a research agenda that can inform this important work.” She added, however, that research alone is not enough: “Scholars have to get out of the ivory tower and into the real world so that their expertise and knowledge can actually become useful to people who want to solve problems.”
Vanessa Siddle Walker Emory University This citation is awarded for Dr. Walker’s path-breaking research on the history of Black educators in the South prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Her scholarship has been instrumental in the re-writing of the history American education, especially the story of school desegregation and what was gained and lost through its implementation. For nearly three decades, Dr. Walker has explored the true story of the professional network of Black educators working in the de jure segregated schools serving African American children in the Jim Crow era. Her work has shed light on the inner workings of these schools and educators who taught, empowered and shepherded their students through a dangerous and oppressive political context. Her research has demonstrated that these were not educational settings that Black students needed to be rescued from through school desegregation policy, but rather they were institutions guided by a network of professional collaborations and hidden systems of advocacy that demanded equality and justice for the Black children. And yet, rather than being resistant to school desegregation policies, which would eventually close these schools and lead to the loss of their jobs, the Black educators of this era worked side-by-side with the civil rights lawyers to make those policies possible. Not only did Dr. Walker conduct this painstaking historical research, primarily through archival documents, but she also founded and directed a program at Emory University that provided training to educators in the African American pedagogical model uncovered by her research. This program, called Teaching in the Urban South (TITUS), brought to life the vision and professional knowledge of the Black educators of another era. This effort to translate the past into the present is symbolic of Dr. Walker’s deep connection to the power of the untold stories of Black educators as she works to address present-day educational issues that Black students continue to face long after the end of de jure segregation.
2018 - Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Carol D. Lee by AERA President Deborah Ball
2017 - Alfredo J. Artiles, Henry T. Frierson and Gloria J. Ladson-Billings by AERA President Vivian L. Gadsden 2016 - Amy Stuart Wells and John S. Rogers by AERA President Jeannie Oakes 2015 - Etta R. Hollins and Adelaide L. Sanford by AERA President Joyce E. King 2014 - Larry V. Hedges and Felice J. Levine by AERA President Barbara Schneider 2013 - Shirley Brice Heath, Yvonne Sessions Lincoln, and John Brooks Slaughter by AERA President William G. Tierney 2012 - Kofi Lomotey, Cynthia A. Tyson and Rick R. McCown by AERA President Arnetha Ball 2011 - Linda Darling-Hammond, Patricia Gandara and Mike Rose by AERA President Kris D. Gutiérrez 2010 - Luis C. Moll, Geoffrey B. Saxe, and William F. Tate by AERA President Carol D. Lee 2009 - Richard J. Shavelson and Carol H. Weiss by AERA President Lorraine M. McDonnell 2008 - Walter R. Allen, Patricia F. Campbell, and John Q. Easton by AERA President William F. Tate 2007 - Edmund W. Gordon and Robert E. Stake by AERA President Eva L. Baker 2006 - Beverly M. Gordon by AERA President Gloria Ladson-Billings 2005 - Ann Lieberman by AERA President Marilyn Cochran-Smith 2004 - Ralph J. Putnam by AERA President Hilda Borko 2003 - Robert Glaser by AERA President Robert L. Linn 2002 - Fred Neumann, Lloyd Bond, and Mike Smith by AERA President Andrew C. Porter 2000 - Pat Graham by AERA President Lorrie A. Shepard 1998 - Elizabeth Cohen by AERA President James A. Banks 1997 - Elizabeth Fennema by AERA President Penelope L. Peterson 1995 - James Comer, M.D. by AERA President Jane A. Stallings 1994 - Jerome Brunner by AERA President Ann L. Brown