Hello!
My name is Sara Sands Francis, and I am an Instructional Associate Professor of Public Administration at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. I also serve as the Associate Director of the Elizabeth Rockwell Center on Ethics & Leadership, where I run our EDR Center Scholars Program and organize events.
I study the politics of education, focusing on governance, K-12 school reform, and leadership, with particular emphasis on teacher leadership and leadership for the public and non-profit sectors. I conduct qualitative and quantitative research at the intersection of K-12 education policy, political science, and public administration. My mission is to bridge theory and practice through research, generating new insights that can help practitioners, policymakers, and researchers make more informed decisions and reform educational systems to be more equitable. My current research projects cover a range of topics, including the influence of philanthropy on education politics and policy, school choice, education governance, complexity theory for teacher leadership, and antisemitism in higher education. My academic work appears in the International Journal for Complexity in Education, Educational Policy, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, and Texas Educator Preparation. My most recent op-ed is featured in the Houston Chronicle. More on my research is below.
My career has spanned the private, public, and non-profit sectors. When I moved to Texas, I worked as a researcher at the University of Houston Education Research Center in the College of Education. Previously, I served as the Research & Data Manager for the Office of Teacher Leadership at the New York City Department of Education, leading all program evaluation and research strategy. I have also held positions at the Center for Public Research & Leadership at Columbia Law, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and IBM. I hold a Ph.D. in Politics & Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, an M.Phil. in Education from the University of Cambridge (U.K.), and B.A. in Political Economy & English from Tulane University. In my free time, I am a published creative non-fiction writer and currently working on a collection of poems and paintings.
1) How does the distribution of power and voice across levels of government, including within schools, influence education policy and politics?
2) How do institutions and organizational leadership, including who leads and how, affect policy problems, solutions, implementation and outcomes?
3) How can we leverage new approaches or frameworks, or adapt existing theories (particularly organizational theory), to rethink program strategy and evaluation in complex systems?