Education and Social Policy: Accomplishments

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doctoral students John Oluwadero and Hojung Lee meet with School of Education professor Kenneth A. Shores and Laura Desimone, the L. Sandra and Bruce L. Hammonds Professor in Teacher Education and director of research in the College of Education and Human Development.

Check out the latest accomplishments of our program’s faculty, staff, students and alumni.

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Honors and Awards

John Oluwadero

John Oluwadero ‘26 received the Marvin B. Sussman Prize, an award presented to a Ph.D. graduate of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration whose dissertation completed in the previous year is judged to be the most outstanding in its theoretical formulation or empiricism.

Laura Desimone, the program’s first director and current faculty member, was elected to the National Academy of Education. As a national expert in designing meaningful and effective opportunities for teacher learning, she is one of 19 national and international scholars elected to membership this year.
Ivan Gradjansky was selected for a Graduate Scholar Award renewal. The award recognizes outstanding students based on nominations from graduate programs.
Arun Chaudhary received a Doctoral Research Award from the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. The research grant covers eligible expenditures, including equipment, supplies, travel for data collection, professional development or other items that bear directly on the dissertation.
Senran (Laurence) Wang received second place for the Graduate Poster Award at the Steele Research Symposium at the University of Delaware (April 2026).
Rachel Fischer was awarded the Sara Miller McCune Scholarship for in-person Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) quantitative methods courses at the University of Michigan this summer (2026).
Mina Sajjadi received a Unidel Distinguished Graduate Scholar Award, the premier award offered to doctoral students by the University of Delaware.

Publications

Rachel Fidel ‘26, Kenneth A. Shores, associate professor, and Anamarie Whitaker, associate program director and assistant professor, are publishing:

“Holding Out or Holding Back? Shifts in Kindergarten Redshirting and Retention Since the COVID-19 Pandemic” in Educational Researcher. Using student-level data from 2010-2024, they found that redshirting rates in Delaware spiked dramatically in fall 2021, with the largest relative increases among historically underrepresented groups, including Black, Hispanic and low-income students. Retention showed a long-term declining trend that was disrupted only in 2021, when rates returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Hojung Lee ‘25 and Kenneth A. Shores, associate professor, coauthored:

“School Finance in the U.S.,” a chapter in the third edition of Economics of Education: A Comprehensive Overview, a leading reference volume in the field. The chapter synthesizes research on U.S. school finance systems.
Yubin Jang and Lauren Bailes, associate professor, coauthored:

“Funding Futures: The Uneven Geography of Title II-A Education Spending. Educational Policy.” The study employs a document analysis of all the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans submitted to the United States federal government from 2017 to 2022 in order to examine Title II, Part A implementation across all states.
Mina Sajjadi and Laura Desimone, the program’s first director and current faculty member, coauthored:

“How policy features can facilitate teacher learning” for Professional Development in Education. The study looks at the powerful role played by specificity, consistency, authority, power and stability in improving the likelihood that teachers will implement with quality what they learned in their professional development.
Mina Sajjadi published:

“Emotional Vulnerability of Iranian EFL Teachers in the Context of Online Collaborative Action Research” in Emotional Vulnerability of Language Teachers in Digital Settings (pages 169-186). Insights into teachers’ professional development were acquired, and the obtained data were analyzed qualitatively.

Presentations

Senran (Laurence) Wang

Senran (Laurence) Wang and Florence Xiaotao Ran, associate program director and assistant professor, presented:

“Connecting College and Career: Dual Enrollment and Postsecondary Outcomes for CTE-Bound Students” at the 51st Annual Conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy in Chicago (March 2026).
Yubin Jang presented:

“Depicting Inequality: A Scoping Review of Material Metaphors Describing Racialized and Gendered Career Differences” at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (April 2026).
Ivan Gradjansky presented:

“School Medicaid, A Cross-State Analysis” at the Steele Research Symposium at the University of Delaware (April 2026). Ongoing work on Medicaid rules for school-based services across U.S. states was presented.
John Oluwadero ‘26 is presenting:

“Decolonising Social Protection in a Post-Aid World: Implications for Inclusive Livelihood Transformation” at the Social Policy Association Annual Conference 2026 in Liverpool, England (July 2026).
Vandeka Eze presented:

“Developing a Standardized Measure of Housing Instability through Community Engaged Research: A QuanCrit Paradigm” dissertation proposal (April 2026). Eze’s dissertation focuses on developing a standardized measure of housing instability through a community-engaged analysis. The proposal defense marks her formal advancement toward dissertation completion and reflects the development of an independent research agenda at the intersection of housing instability, measurement, prevention and social policy.
Durga Kumar Karki presented:

“A Qualitative Analysis to Understand the Measurability of Goals and Actions in School Improvement Plans (SIPs)” at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (April 2026).
Rachel Fischer hosted:

“Rural Education: A Conversation During a Time of Educational Turbulence ” at the 51st Annual Conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy in Chicago (March 2026). The conversation group on rural education included rural scholars from a variety of universities.
Donatus Doe presented:

From “College-for-all to Career Readiness: A Comparative Policy Analysis of Shifts in National School-to-Work Reforms” at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (April 2026). This research examines recent policy shifts on the transition from school from a narrow “college-for-all” emphasis to broader and more inclusive “postsecondary education” and “career pathways” perspectives.
Mina Sajjadi presented:

“Instructor Buy-In and Instructional Practice in Corequisite Mathematics Reform: Evidence from a Mixed-Methods Study of Virginia Community College System” at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles (April 2026).
Mina Sajjadi presented:

“Families in Global Perspective” as a guest lecturer for a UD class, Issues in Global Studies.
Mina Sajjadi presented:

“Who Participates in Professional Learning? Patterns of Teacher Participation Across Student Contexts” at the Biden School Research Showcase..

Community Outreach and Service

Mina Sajjadi was a proposal reviewer for the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education), Section 06: In-Service Teacher Professional Development. She reviewed 12 submissions and provided rubric-based evaluations and formative feedback.
Mina Sajjadi is Communication Committee Representative for the Education Graduate Association (EGA). She has coordinated and distributed newsletters to College of Education and Human Development graduate students.
Rachel Fischer is a member of the student leadership team that is planning and developing the Cross-University Mentoring Conference, which the College of Education and Human Development is hosting on June 5, 2026.

Professional Achievements

Mina Sajjadi was a research graduate assistant. She conducted quantitative and mixed-methods research in education policy and teacher professional learning, analyzed large-scale educational datasets using R, Mplus, HLM and Bayesian methods; supported research design, literature reviews, data cleaning and manuscript preparation; and collaborated on conference presentations and journal manuscripts.

Alumni

Hojung Lee ’25 is a postdoctoral associate in Rice University’s Department of Sociology. She investigates how resource allocation decisions shape opportunities for underserved students.

Lee was one of five Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM) Equity and Inclusion Young Professional Fellowship recipients. The fellowship recognizes early career scholars committed to advancing diversity and inclusion in public policy research. Lee was selected by the APPAM as the 2026 fellow liaison for the program, a role filled each year by a single fellow from the preceding cohort. The liaison mentors the incoming class and coordinates programming between fellows and APPAM leadership.
Rachel Fidel ‘26 was hired as a postdoctoral associate at the National Institute for Early Education Research to work on research similar to her dissertation work: “Interdependent choices: State early childhood policy and family decision-making in the United States.”