Jeannie Oakes, director of the Ford Foundation’s programs in Educational Equity and Scholarship, has been voted AERA president-elect. Her term as president begins at the conclusion of AERA’s 2015 Annual Meeting. She will serve as president during AERA’s centennial year, following one year of service as president-elect.
Oakes is also Presidential Professor Emeritus in Educational Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she founded the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access; UC’s All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity; and Center X’s urban teacher education program.
Oakes’s scholarship examines the effect of social policies on the education of low-income students of color and investigates equity-minded reform. Her Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality was named one of the 20th century’s “most influential” education books, and Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform won AERA’s Outstanding Book Award.
She holds AERA’s Early Career, Palmer O. Johnson Memorial, and Social Justice in Education Research Awards, and has given five distinguished AERA lectures. Oakes is a Fellow of AERA. Her previous AERA service includes Council member-at-large; Early Career Award and Professional Development Committee chair; and member of other committees and editorial boards.
Oakes’s other honors include the California Educational Research Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education’s Margaret Lindsey Research Award, the National Association for Multicultural Education’s Multicultural Research Award, the Educational Press Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Public Service Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Education. Oakes has a Ph.D. in education from UCLA.
She will succeed Joyce E. King, the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair of Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership at Georgia State University, in April 2015. King will assume the AERA presidency on April 8, 2014, after the close of the Association’s 2014 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.