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.
My next book, tentatively titled Taken for Granted: Native Land and the Colonial Origins of Public Education, grows out of research for Dividing the Public and uses the history of permanent state school funds to trace the connections between Native dispossession, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the origins of public education in the US. In connecting recent histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism with the history of education, the book will retell the story of the origins of public education in the US from a continental perspective, exploring how ideas about race, citizenship, and the right to reside in North America shaped foundational institutional structures of public education that persist today.