Educational Policy Seminar Series: Catherine Voulgarides

Join BU Wheelock's Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies and the Wheelock Educational Policy Center for the Education Policy Seminar Series. All are welcome. The seminar series is geared towards an academic audience and will include detailed and technical discussion about methods used in the research, in addition to the policy context and implications. Catherine's work engages with the social, political, and historical conditions that impact educators across the educational ecosystem to identify more effective and equitable policy and legal solutions for long standing inequities. Catherine has expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research approaches. Using these methods, she seeks to understand the equity issues that arise at the intersection of educational policy and law, organizational contexts, and educator interpretation and implementation dynamics—with a focus on special education policy. The question became half of the title for her book published by Teachers College Press in 2018 entitled Does Compliance Matter? IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice, which won the best publication award by the American Sociological Association (ASA) Disability and Society Section. The book, based on Catherine's dissertation, was a comparative ethnographic study focused on understanding the relationship between racial disproportionality in special education and policy compliance across contexts. Dr. Voulgarides' work has been funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Education Research Service Project program, and CUNY Hunter College. Catherine has published numerous peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. She also served in various leadership roles for national educational organizations.