About

Janelle Scott is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Education and the African American Studies Department. She holds the Robert J. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities and serves as the Chair of the Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy Cluster of the Othering and Belonging Institute. She is also the Associate Dean for Students in the College of Letters and Science. Scott earned a PhD in Education Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the relationship between education, policy, and equality of opportunity, focusing on the racial politics of public education, the politics of school choice, marketization, privatization, and the role of elite and community-based advocacy in shaping research evidence and public education. She has published extensively in books and journals, and has authored four books, including 'The Politics of Education in an Era of Inequality' and co-edited the 'World Yearbook of Education.' Scott is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a Trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and a member of the National Academy of Education. Her work emphasizes educational disparities, civil rights in education policy, and democratic schooling.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Library science
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• World Wide Web
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Organizations in Education Policy and Politics

  2025-07-17 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Active engagement increases client interaction with disaster preparedness resources at veterinary clinics

  Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association · 2025-12-10

  article

  Objective: To compare the effectiveness of active versus passive QR code distribution on the frequency of veterinary client visits to a website containing disaster preparedness resources. Methods: A prospective trial was conducted in a veterinary clinical setting from May 27 through July 3, 2025, comparing client engagement with web-based disaster preparedness resources; a website QR code was distributed actively (handed to clients) versus passively (posted in the clinic). Website engagement was tracked with the use of a web-analytics platform, and group differences were assessed with descriptive statistics, χ2 tests, and risk ratios with 95% CIs. Results: Clients were 5.3 times more likely to click the QR code when it was actively distributed (95% CI, 1.88 to 14.96; χ2 = 11.6). Conclusions: Actively handing out resources was more effective at encouraging clients to engage with the material than passively making these flyers available for clients to pick up on their own. Clinical Relevance: Veterinary teams can use existing resources and brief client interactions to support the development of disaster preparedness planning that includes pets.

  PublisherDOI

• Evaluating the significance of Toxoplasma gondii sporozoite antibodies in cats: a pilot study

  Parasites & Vectors · 2024-12-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: People can acquire Toxoplasma gondii infection by ingestion of sporulated oocysts passed in cat feces; whether this route is common in cats is unknown. The primary objectives of this study were to (a) adapt a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the detection of T. gondii tachyzoite IgG antibodies in feline sera to detect T. gondii sporozoite IgG antibodies, (b) utilize the ELISA to confirm that exposed cats can mount an antibody response to sporozoites, (c) estimate the prevalence of sporozoite antibodies in naturally exposed cats, and (d) evaluate associations between the serologic status of naturally exposed cats and clinical signs that could be caused by toxoplasmosis. METHODS: To generate positive control sera, three male cats were orally inoculated with approximately 100,000 sporulated oocysts of the ME49 strain of T. gondii. A human antisporozoite antibody ELISA was then adapted for use with cat sera. Detectable levels of antisporozoite IgG were found in two of the three experimentally inoculated cats. The sera of 100 healthy cats and 295 clinically ill cats were assessed in the prototype sporozoite ELISA and a commercially available tachyzoite ELISA. RESULTS: The ELISA estimated that prevalence of antisporozoite IgG was 2% in healthy cats and 3.1% in clinically ill cats; in contrast, the overall estimated prevalence of antitachyzoite IgG was 15%. Only two of 395 cats (0.5%) had both antisporozoite and antitachyzoite IgG. CONCLUSIONS: While experimentally infected and naturally exposed cats developed antisporozoite antibodies, the low prevalence did not allow for the evaluation of associations among clinical signs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating the Significance of Toxoplasma Gondii Sporozoite Antibodies in Cats: A Pilot Study

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Small advances and swift retreat: Race-conscious educational policy in the Obama and Trump administrations

  Education Policy Analysis Archives · 2023-03-21 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization personnel, we sought to understand how Obama officials envisioned and changed the role of the federal government in fostering K-12 race-conscious educational policies and what mechanisms they used to advance priorities. We also explored changes Trump administration officials made to federal civil rights policies and through which institutional means. Our findings reveal through-lines between past and present political agendas and the methods for enactment. Obama’s interagency efforts to reinvigorate civil rights oversight and enforcement in education harkened back to the mid-1960s era of bipartisan cooperation around school desegregation. Yet the decades-long legal and policy retrenchment against civil rights advances made in the 1960s constrained further progress. Trump’s administration advocated for the privatization of public education through increased choice and opposed race-consciousness in education law and policy. The reshaping of the federal judiciary under Trump presents challenges for race-consciousness in the law for years to come. Recognizing these consistent through-lines and constraints will be essential for advocates and policymakers going forward.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issue Information

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2023-01-01

  paratextOpen access

  10,224 (Rest of World), 6,625 (Europe), 5,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Punitive school discipline as a mechanism of structural marginalization with implications for health inequity: A systematic review of quantitative studies in the health and social sciences literature

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 45 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology

  Punitive school discipline deploys surveillance, exclusion, and corporal punishment to deter or account for perceived student misbehavior. Yet, education and legal scholarship suggests it fails to achieve stated goals and exacerbates harm. Furthermore, it is disproportionately imposed upon Black, Latinx, Native/Indigenous, LGBTQIA, and disabled students, concentrating its harms among marginalized young people. Its implications for health, however, are less clear. Using public health theories of sociostructural embodiment, we propose a framework characterizing pathways linking societal ideologies (e.g., racism) to punitive discipline with implications for health and health inequity and then present our systematic review of the punitive school discipline-health literature (N = 19 studies) conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. Data were extracted on guiding theories, study characteristics, measurement, methods, and findings. This literature links punitive school discipline to greater risk for numerous health outcomes, including persistent depressive symptoms, depression, drug use disorder in adulthood, borderline personality disorder, antisocial behavior, death by suicide, injuries, trichomoniasis, pregnancy in adolescence, tobacco use, and smoking, with documented implications for racial health inequity. Using our adapted framework, we contextualize results and recommend avenues for future research. Our findings support demands to move away from punitive school discipline toward health-affirming interventions to promote school connectedness, safety, and wellbeing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• World Yearbook of Education 2023

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Library science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2022-09-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The introductory chapter by the co-editors lays the framework for discussions of racialization and global inequality across global contexts. We define particular terms we are utilizing and how we see the forces of colonization having shaped many of the forms of racialization that exist across the globe. “Race” per se is not a category of analysis in this volume; the processes of “racialization” are of interest here insofar as they have created hierarchies, rationale for forms of domination, and unequal social and educational opportunities across the globe. Each of the fifteen chapters in the volume is summarized briefly in the introductory chapter to set the foundation for the book and begin to put chapter authors in conversation with one another to offer coherence to the broad-ranging book.

  PublisherDOI

• Racialization, Whiteness, and Education

  2022-09-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  This chapter discusses whiteness as a global ideology that determines elite status, access to symbolic and material resources, and ultimately shapes the structure and dynamics of schooling, including curriculum policies. Despite the global reach of whiteness, the history and role of racism in its dominance can often be under-theorized. Revisiting his 2002 article, “The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse” that argued that “critical pedagogy benefits from an intersectional understanding of whiteness studies and globalization discourse” (p. 29), through this conversation between Zeus Leonardo, Monisha Bajaj, and Janelle Scott, the chapter offers analyses about the shifting terrain of white supremacy as it manifests and circulates globally. Leonardo calls for both global studies of whiteness as well as comparative whiteness studies across contexts that attend to history, geography, power asymmetries, and ideology.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Lubienski

  Indiana University Bloomington

  18 shared

• Gary L. Anderson

  16 shared

• Elizabeth DeBray

  15 shared

• Sonya Douglass Horsford

  13 shared

• Elise Castillo

  Hartford Financial Services (United States)

  7 shared

• Tina Trujillo

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

• Huriya Jabbar

  University of Southern California

  6 shared

• Priya Goel La Londe

  University of Hong Kong

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• 2020 Critic's Choice Award from the American Educational Stu…
• AES A Critic's Choice Award (2023)
• Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award by the UC Berkeley Gradua…
• Distinguished Scholar Award by the American Educational Rese…
• Fellow of the American Educational Research Association