About

Anjalé Welton is the Department Chair and Rupple-Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, within the School of Education's Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis department. Her scholarship examines how educational leaders dialogue about and address race and racism in school communities, with a focus on the role of student and community voice, leadership, activism, and education reform. Welton has professional experience coordinating leadership and empowerment programs for urban youth, facilitating urban education teacher preparation programs, and working as a teacher in large urban districts. She is committed to providing professional development for educational leaders on issues of race and equity. Her recent co-authored book, 'Anti-racist Educational Leadership and Policy: Addressing Racism in Public Education,' challenges school leaders to consider the racial implications of their policies. Her research and work contribute to understanding and addressing systemic racial inequities in education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Anti-Racist Policy Decision-Making in Schools: A Framework to Root Out Racism in Education

  Education, equity, economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• How Whiteness Fuels Anti-Blackness: Black Leaders’ Experiences in an Urban High School

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2024-05-13 · 2 citations

  article

  This article explores whiteness and how it manifests itself in an urban, Midwestern high school. This examination is done through counter-storytelling to unpack how Black women leaders navigate whiteness while simultaneously experiencing anti-Blackness within and outside a research-practice partnership. These counter-stories came from a larger research project on how school practitioners work towards anti-racism using an anti-racist policy decision-making protocol. Much research centers on the experiences of Black students in PK-12 education settings; however, there is an underwhelming amount of research that analyzes how anti-Black racism or anti-Blackness exists in educational leadership. Our findings reveal that Black women leaders negotiate whiteness through various strategies, encounter moments of anti-Blackness and witness it occurring among Black students within the school. Implications of this study illuminate the importance of counter-narratives in uncovering details otherwise unseen, as well as describe the ways counter-narratives moved the work within the research-practice partnerships forward.

  PublisherDOI

• A Letter From the Editors: The Past, Present, and Future of <i>Educational Researcher</i>

  Educational Researcher · 2024-01-01

  letterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A Path Toward Racial Justice in Education: Anti-Racist Policy Decision Making in School Districts

  Educational Policy · 2024-08-09 · 7 citations

  article

  The U.S. education system has been a critical site in the nation’s ongoing fight for racial equity. Yet, despite many attempts to promote equity within and across schools, efforts fall short in a system designed to uphold norms rooted in whiteness and white supremacy. We need anti-racist educational leaders who can identify and push back at the racial bias embedded in educational policies. Through a research-practice partnership with a Midwestern high school, we sought to understand how an anti-racist policy decision-making protocol can be used to redress inequitable policies to be racially just. The anti-racist policy decision-making protocol promotes social justice by empowering school practitioners to become policy agents. Implications from our findings point to the need for school practitioners to be critically introspective and identify and directly address the politics of whiteness that can ensue when working in partnership to do anti-racist policy change.

  PublisherDOI

• Challenges in sustaining professional learning communities focused on equity

  Journal of Educational Change · 2024-07-17 · 7 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Let's Face It, the Racial Politics Are Always There: A Critical Race Approach to Policy Implementation in the Wake of Anti–Critical Race Theory Rhetoric

  2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Let’s face it, the racial politics are always there: A critical race approach to policy implementation in the wake of anti-CRT rhetoric

  Education Policy Analysis Archives · 2023-09-26 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  School communities across the United States are experiencing increasing calls to remove the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) from their curricula despite not actually doing so in practice. This anti-CRT push is part of a larger, conservative agenda to ban teaching “divisive” topics in public schools and exemplifies the underlying racial politics existent in educational policy implementation. In this article, we analyze the legal efforts to ban CRT and anti-racist teaching in one state through a framework that situates policy implementation within CRT, which seeks to advance how whiteness, interest convergence, racial realism, and the erasure of people of color are continual to policy implementation. Through a critical discourse analysis of anti-CRT rhetoric, we illustrate how predictable patterns such as white backlash, overt racism, racial violence, and racial trauma are brought to light in policy implementation. We then offer an example of CRT as critical race praxis (CRP) in another state that works to counter racism and create anti-racist change in policy design and implementation. CRP is perhaps one tool school leaders have at their disposal to subvert whiteness and white supremacy in policymaking, especially policy implementation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Antiracism Education Activism: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Promoting Racial Equity

  AERA Open · 2022-01-01 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access

  Although antiracism activism has contributed to substantive progress under certain circumstances and in certain contexts, little research attempts to theorize how antiracism activism is manifest across contexts. In this article, we explore individual and collective antiracist actions within and outside schools. We introduce a theoretical framework that identifies four domains of activism—policy, community, leadership, and teaching and learning—in which activists operate to make a positive difference in promoting racial equity and antiracism in education. The framework offers a systemic way of thinking about antiracist activism in education and the importance of recognizing that several aspects of antiracist activism usually conceived as distinct are interrelated within and across domains. Indeed, antiracist education activism must be understood holistically and systemically if we seek to dismantle the racism that is woven into every piece of the education system.

  PublisherDOI

• Companion Article: Understanding the Politics of Race, Equity, and Neoliberalism in Everyday Leadership

  2022-01-01

  other
  PublisherDOI

• Using Anti-racism to Challenge Whiteness in Educational Leadership

  Springer international handbooks of education · 2021-01-01 · 12 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
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Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Diem

  University of Missouri

  25 shared

• Katherine Cumings Mansfield

  11 shared

• Melissa A. Martínez

  University of Colorado Denver

  7 shared

• Morgaen L. Donaldson

  5 shared

• Kimberly LeChasseur

  Worcester Polytechnic Institute

  5 shared

• Anysia Mayer

  California State University, Stanislaus

  5 shared

• Michelle D. Young

  MCPHS University

  5 shared

• Jennifer Jellison Holme

  The University of Texas at Austin

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Educational Policy and Leadership

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2005

• M.S., Educational Policy and Leadership

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2001

• B.A., Political Science

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1998

Awards & honors

• Taylor and Francis “Outstanding New Textbook” Award in Behav…
• AESA Critic's Choice Book Award (2021)