Contact:
Tony Pals, tpals@aera.net
(202) 238-3235, (202) 288-9333 (cell)

Washington, D.C., March 27, 2017 — Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her term as president begins on April 17, 2018, at the conclusion of AERA’s 2018 Annual Meeting.

Wells is a nationally recognized authority on the intersection of racial inequality and educational policies aimed at serving the rapidly changing “public” of public education. She has conducted large-scale projects on school desegregation; charter schools; tracking; and, most recently, the relationship between the changing demographics of suburban and urban communities and their public school enrollments, opportunities, and reputations. 

Wells directs The Public Good, a Public School Support Organization that uses research to help sustain equitable and socially just integrated K–12 schools. At Teachers College, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1991, Wells and an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students organize an annual professional development Summer Institute on teaching and learning in racially diverse schools that applies research to the creation of meaningful school and classroom integration.  

Wells is an AERA Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2016 AERA Presidential Citation for outstanding contributions to education research and the 2000 AERA Early Career Award.

Upon becoming AERA president in 2018, she will succeed Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. Ball will assume the AERA presidency on May 1, 2017, after the close of the association’s 2017 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

Council Members-at-Large

Two other prominent scholars were elected to member-at-large positions on the AERA Council, commencing in 2017–2018. They will serve three-year terms.