The Havens Wright Center for Social Justice

Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr.

Position title: Associate Professor

Email: kevin.henry@wisc.edu

Address:
270D Education Building

A man looks directly into the camera. His hair is closely cropped atop his head, while it is completely shorn on the sides of his head. He has a dark brown mustache and full beard. He wears a cadet-blue suit with a white pocket square, a white button-down shirt, and a patterned tie in pink, blue, and white hues. He appears before cherrywood bookshelves filled with books.
Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. is an award-winning scholar of race, racism, and education policy and practice. Dr. Henry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interdisciplinary scholarship investigates the politics of education, specifically privatization in education such as school choice/market-based approaches to education. Dr. Henry’s research more concretely revolves around the intersections of charter schools and the charter school authorization process, political economy and neoliberalism, anti-Blackness, and Black educational thought and efforts towards justice. As a qualitative methodologist, Dr. Henry’s interdisciplinary scholarship draws on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Studies, and Political Science.
He has published in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy, and Teachers College Record, among others. He is the co-author, with Colleen Capper of Organizational Theory for Equity and Diversity, 2nd Edition (Routledge), co-editor with Kevin Clay of The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship: Race and Revolt in Education (University of Minnesota Press), as well as co-editor with Shameka Powell of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education, Volume 1: Race and Ethnicity. His research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation, where he served as a writing fellow in the Research to Reduce Inequality in the Lives of Young People initiative. Dr. Henry is an Associate Editor for Educational Administration Quarterly. He also currently serves on the editorial boards of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Equity & Excellence in Education, Journal of Research on Leadership Education, and Educational Psychology for Policy and Practice. Dr. Henry is also the co-editor of Routledge’s Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity book series.
Prior to returning to Wisconsin, Dr. Henry served on faculty at the University of Arizona in the College of Education and was a founding member of and policy fellow in the Education Policy Center.