My research centers on the relationship between public schooling, American governance and state power, and social opportunity and inequality over time. I situate my work at the intersection of history of education and twentieth century U.S. political and policy history. I am interested in public schools as important, but often overlooked sites of democratic governance and social policy, especially the dynamics of federalism, tensions and tradeoffs between localism and equity, and the (often hidden) role of state governments in education and social policy. I interrogate the changing meanings and claims of public interest and state power in education, and how public schooling shapes and interacts with larger structures of social and economic opportunity and inequality. Driving these questions are a set of concerns about equity and democracy, as well as a belief that history offers critical perspective on these concerns in our own time. This interest in what history offers to the present is reflected in my historical monographs and has driven some additional work I have done to explore the value of history to contemporary policy and to undergraduate liberal education.

My first book, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2012) explores the connections between public school reform and American political development in the early twentieth century. It explores how an array of reformers across the nation, working from the top down and bottom up in ways both planned and improvised, expanded the reach of public schools, broadened their aims and activities, rationalized their organization and governance, strengthened state government oversight, developed a national policy conversation, and expanded public authority and oversight over children. In the process they expanded the institutions and authority of government into the everyday lives of children and families, developed a de facto national education system despite decentralized legal control, and positioned schools as social welfare institutions that would safeguard opportunity and provide for the welfare of citizens in an era of deepening economic inequality and instability. The book thus "brings the state back in" to the history of education and brings schools back in our discussions of state power during a pivotal moment in American political development to explore the tradeoffs and consequences of this kind of hidden social policy that tolerated signficant inequalities and promised more than it could deliver.

My second book, Structuring Inequality: How Schools, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education (University of Chicago Press, 2024) explores how public schooling interacted with a host of housing, land use, and tax policies to shape economic and racial inequality over time and space in metropolitan Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century.  It explores the construction, contestation, and defense of the policies of metropolitan and educational inequality in multiple dimensions—across policy domains, levels of government, local places, and time periods, as well as what happened and the narratives constructed to explain what happened. It explores how liberal reformers tried to name and challenge this inequality in the 1960s and 1970s by locating and pulling equity policy levers at a host of different sites of government (in all three branches of government and at local, regional, state, and federal levels) and the resistance and counter-mobilizations they faced from a variety of groups who benefited from the way things were. I explore how these defenders of inequality succeeded in the final decades of the twentieth century in not only closing off many of the avenues for change that reformers identified, but shifting policy narratives about the problem and solution to largely sideline (or “forget”) the spatial and structural critiques and approaches that had been on the table. I argue that understanding this historical construction and "forgetting" of inequality through policy is important for understanding our present and identifying places for intervention and change.

I am currently at work on a new monograph tentatively titled Education Inc.: For-Profit Businesses in the Development of Public Education that explores the long history of for-profit business activity in K-12 education, from the development of the textbook industry in the mid-nineteenth century to the 21st century expansion for for-profit charters and educational management organizations. It asks a series of empirical and interpretative questions about this business activity in order to map the long history of the for-profit sector in K-12 education, analyze its impact on the developing American public education system, and critically examine the very meaning and boundaries of public and private, state and market, for-profit and non-profit over time.

In addition to these monographs and journal articles flowing from them, I have also published essays on the value and challenges of writing policy-relevant history ("Lessons from the Past" in Clio at the Table: Using History to Inform and Improve Education Policy, 2008) and measuring learning in history ("Measuring College Learning in History" with Lendol Caldor in Improving Quality in American Higher Education (2016).

Howard Foundation Fellowship, 2014-2015

American Council of Learned Societies, 2013-2014

Richard Salomon Faculty Research Award, 2013-2014

Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship, University of Chicago Regenstein Library, 2012-2013

Albert Shanker Educational Research Fellowship, American Federation of Teachers, 2011-2012

National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education Fellow, 2009-2012

National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2010-2011

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Scholar, 2010-2011

Finalist, Spencer Foundation Exemplary Dissertation Award, 2009Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University, 2008-2009

National Parent-Teacher Association National Research Fellowship, 2008

Harry Barnard Dissertation Year History Fellowship, University of Chicago, 2005-2006 (declined)

Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector Fellowship, 2004-2005

Rockefeller Archive Center Grant, 2004

Doolittle-Harrison Research Grant, University of Chicago, 2003

Freehling Research Grant, University of Chicago, 2003

Miller Center for Public Affairs Fellowship, 2003-2004

University of Chicago Century Fellowship, 1998-2002

American Historical Association

History of Education Society

Organization of American Historians

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of American education and twentieth century U.S. history, including History of American Education, Brown v. Board of Education,  Culture Wars in American Schools, Urban Schools in Historical Perspective, Rethinking Society in Modernizing America, and American Political History.