Hello. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. I study how racial, economic, and spatial inequities in education are created through state action, normalized in public discourse over time, and resisted by historically marginalized communities. My first book, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity, was published by Cornell University Press in 2024. The book traces how a series of seemingly mundane and technical policies connected to public school funding helped create the racially, economically, and spatially fragmented postwar metropolis. In tracing how a poorly understood world of lawmaking connected to school funding extracted wealth from communities of color, subsidized white affluence, and promoted residential segregation since the 19th century, the book sheds new light on the culpability of the state in the production of educational inequities that persist in the present. 

Applying a granular and contextual approach to policy analysis rooted in my training as a historian, I am also a leading expert on how state lawmakers structure K-12 school funding systems. He served as a key expert for petitioners in William Penn School District, et al v. PA Department of Education, et al., a landmark civil rights challenge to the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s school funding system.