Education stratification.
How educational institutions sort people, knowledge, opportunities, recognition, and resources across and within educational settings.
ORIGINAL RESEARCHINSTITUTIONAL MAPPINGPUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Mapping how race is made consequential in education.
The Center for the Study of Race in Education is an independent nonprofit research center examining how race operates through educational policy, curriculum, assessment, place, and institutional practice. We produce original research, develop maps and research tools, conduct partnered institutional studies, and create public scholarship that makes the production of educational inequality visible.
about
The Center for the Study of Race in Education was created to deepen public understanding of how racial inequality is organized, measured, taught, and experienced across educational settings. We bring research and practice into the same frame, pairing analytical rigor with the knowledge of students, educators, leaders, and communities.
Mission
Our mission is to study and challenge the policies, practices, structures, and narratives that produce racial inequity in education — and to develop research, tools, and partnerships that support more just educational institutions.
Vision
We envision educational systems in which race no longer predicts access, treatment, representation, safety, or opportunity; communities have meaningful power in defining educational success; and institutions are accountable for both the outcomes they produce and the processes through which those outcomes are made.
Our commitments
Historically grounded
Present-day educational patterns cannot be understood apart from the policies and institutions that produced them.
Methodologically plural
Quantitative data, qualitative inquiry, archival evidence, visual analysis, and community knowledge each illuminate a different part of the same problem.
Community-informed
People most affected by institutional decisions are essential sources of knowledge, not simply subjects of study.
Useful beyond publication
Research should inform public understanding, institutional decision-making, professional learning, and policy design.
Structural in focus
We examine how systems distribute opportunity and harm, resisting explanations that locate responsibility only in individual students, families, or educators.
How we understand the work
The Center's work is anchored in education stratification: the study of how educational institutions sort people, knowledge, opportunities, and resources — and how those arrangements become normalized, justified, and reproduced. This lens allows us to connect questions that are too often separated: school assignment and funding, curriculum and representation, assessment and measurement, discipline and safety, institutional culture, and access to advanced learning.
Research Agenda and Portfolio
What we study
Curriculum, history, and representation.
Whose experiences and ideas enter official knowledge, how they are framed, and what patterned inclusion and omission teach about race and power.
Assessment and standardization.
How definitions of achievement, standardized assessments, categories, data systems, and visual evidence shape what institutions recognize and what they leave unseen.
Policy, place, and institutional practice.
How rules, routines, resource decisions, community conditions, and organizational responses distribute educational opportunity and harm.
Signature initiatives
The Color of Achievement
A research program examining how race, gender, power, and historical representation operate across official curriculum and standardized assessment. The program connects original datasets, statistical analysis, visual scholarship, and historical interpretation.
The Achievement Tracker
The public research infrastructure of The Color of Achievement. The Tracker organizes and maps curricular topics and assessment appearances so that patterns of visibility, omission, repetition, and institutional recognition can be studied across time.
Humans of Standardization
A research and public-history initiative documenting the people, judgments, institutions, and experiences behind systems of educational measurement. Through interviews, oral histories, archival research, and visual storytelling, the project makes the human decisions within seemingly objective systems visible.
The Color of Achievement, the Achievement Tracker, and Humans of Standardization are initiatives of The Center for the Study of Race in Education, founded and directed by Tanishia Lavette Williams, PhD.
audits and mapping
Research projects, not compliance reviews.
The Center partners with schools, universities, public agencies, foundations and research organizations to conduct rigorous audits and mapping studies. These are not compliance reviews or generic consulting engagements.
They are structured research projects designed to reveal how race operates through institutional systems, and to contribute, wherever possible, to broader public knowledge.
What we can investigate
Curriculum and representation audits
Systematic analysis of visibility, framing, omission, sequence and epistemic authority across curricula, instructional materials and official knowledge.
Assessment and measurement audits
Examination of test content, constructs, categories, scoring systems, data displays, and the definitions of achievement embedded within them.
Opportunity and resource mapping
Spatial and institutional analysis of how programs, funding, advanced learning, staffing, exposure and educational opportunity are distributed.
Policy-to-practice mapping
Study of how formal policy moves through institutional interpretation, organizational routines, professional judgment and student experience.
Institutional knowledge audits
Analysis of whose experiences, records, histories and forms of evidence shape institutional memory and decision-making.
How a research partnership works
- 01
Define a consequential research question with the partner and affected communities.
- 02
Design an evidence architecture — administrative data, documents, archives, surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, spatial analysis and visual materials.
- 03
Conduct independent analysis using methods selected for the question.
- 04
Produce a report, map, dataset, visualization, archive or brief, then convene participants to interpret its implications.
- 05
Create a public or de-identified contribution to the field when the project permits.
Ways to collaborate
Sponsored institutional study
An organization funds a study of a defined question within its own institution.
Field-mapping initiative
A funder or consortium supports a multi-site study across educational settings.
Data and research collaboration
A partner contributes data, archives, access or methods to a mutually developed study.
Have a question that requires more than a dashboard or a conventional evaluation?
Propose a research partnershippublic scholarship
Public forms for rigorous ideas.
The Center develops public forms for rigorous ideas. Our postcards, talks, briefs, maps, visual essays and archives extend research beyond academic publication while preserving its historical context and analytical complexity.
Monthly postcards
Each month the Center publishes a concise piece of public scholarship that places an idea, artifact, question or finding about race and education into wider view. The postcards invite reflection, preserve important histories, and create an accessible entry point into the Center's research agenda.
Featured founder talk
The Billion-Dollar Problem in Education
Tanishia Lavette Williams, PhD · TED Education Fellow and Speaker · 2024
An introduction, for public audiences, to a central problem animating Dr. Williams's scholarship and the Center's research agenda.
leadership
Tanishia Lavette Williams, PhD
An education stratification scholar, educator and organizational leader whose work examines how policy, curriculum, measurement and institutional practice distribute educational opportunity. Across more than two decades in education, she has served as a teacher, principal, superintendent, district executive, researcher and university instructor, working with students and institutions in Washington, DC, Newark, New York City and beyond.
Dr. Williams founded Reimagined Solutions and established The Center for the Study of Race in Education as the institutional home for The Color of Achievement, the Achievement Tracker, Humans of Standardization, and a growing program of research and public scholarship. Her work connects the history of educational inequality to contemporary systems of curriculum, assessment, policy and practice. She holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy and graduate degrees in education policy, data visualization and information science, urban education leadership, and special education. She is a TED Education Fellow and speaker, and her career has been recognized through national fellowships, scholarly appointments, and the Peabody Award-winning documentary 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School
Start a conversation.
Contact the Center to propose a research partnership, institutional audit, mapping study, data or archival collaboration, speaking request, media inquiry, or another opportunity aligned with our research agenda.
directly contact us
hello@thecenterofrace.orgNew York, New York