DE'JA WOOD - RESEARCH

De'Ja Wood's research examines how Black communities experience, interpret, navigate, and challenge antiblackness in education—and what their experiences reveal about the institutions and policies that produce and sustain it. Her scholarship centers the knowledge Black families, students, educators, and communities develop through their encounters with educational systems, treating that knowledge as critical evidence for understanding how antiblackness operates and where efforts at reform fall short.

Across research on school choice, school discipline, restorative justice, and education policy, Wood traces how antiblackness takes shape across multiple levels of education: in families' everyday encounters with schools, in organizational practices and reform efforts, and in state policies and policy discourse. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative approaches, her work illuminates how antiblack educational conditions are produced and sustained, how Black communities navigate and contest them, and what their experiences can teach us about the possibilities and requirements of meaningful institutional transformation.

Racialized Risk Assessment, Choice, and

Refusal Among Black Families

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Black families increasingly sought alternatives to traditional public schools, raising questions about what families are seeking—and seeking to avoid—across educational environments. My research examines how racialized educational conditions shape these decisions and what families’ choices reveal about the institutions they navigate. In one mixed-methods project, she further develops racialized risk assessment, adapted from Posey-Maddox et al. (2021), to examine how Black families assess school quality alongside potential threats to their children’s dignity, safety, and belonging, and how these conditions shape movement across schools. In related work, she examines Black families’ post-pandemic movement from traditional public schools toward homeschooling within increasingly polarized political environments, theorizing this movement as a potential act of refusal from institutions that marginalize Black students. Together, these projects show how families’ educational decisions are embedded within institutional environments that unequally distribute opportunities and exposure to racial harm. This work shifts analytic attention from asking why Black families make particular educational choices to asking what conditions make those choices necessary, revealing the limits of choice when the conditions families seek to escape extend across the educational environments available to them.

Structural Change and

Black Education Transformation

In a second area of research, De'Ja turns from what Black families’ responses reveal about the need for institutional change to the policies and institutional processes that determine whether efforts to address racial inequality disrupt or reproduce the conditions they seek to change. At the organizational level, two studies examine a predominantly Black school within a Black-led charter network that replaced a discipline policy identified as harmful to Black students with a restorative justice approach. These studies show how competing understandings of racial justice, policy ambiguity, and educator discretion can allow punitive logics to persist despite explicit commitments to institutional change. At the state level, she uses critical policy analysis to examine the racialized logics embedded in school discipline policy and the persistence of racial disparities even in states that appear to be reducing exclusionary discipline. For instance, one study documents a post-pandemic shift toward state policies that widen exclusionary punishment and construct students through adultifying and race-evasive language. Across these projects, De'Ja shows how racial inequality can persist through the design, interpretation, and implementation of reforms intended to address it. Together, this work identifies the organizational and policy conditions necessary to move beyond formal commitments to racial equity toward institutional transformation that supports Black children’s dignity, safety, and humanity.

DISSERTATION

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Black families increasingly sought alternatives to traditional public schools, raising important questions about what families are seeking—and seeking to avoid—when choosing among educational environments. Supported by the AERA-NSF Dissertation Grant (2026), AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship (2025), and Bonsal Applied Education Research Award (2025), this project uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to examine how Black families make school choices and how racialized educational conditions shape student movement across schools. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, participant journals, and artifact collection, Wood examines how Black families assess potential educational environments for their children. Through this work, she further develops the concept of racialized risk assessment, adapted from Posey-Maddox et al. (2021), to explain how Black families evaluate conventional indicators of school quality alongside the risks of racial stereotyping, excessive discipline, social isolation, and other threats to their children’s dignity and belonging. She pairs these qualitative insights with analyses of restricted statewide longitudinal administrative data, using multilevel regression, three-way interaction, and survival models to examine how racialized educational conditions are associated with whether, where, and when students move across schools. By bringing these forms of evidence together, the project connects Black families’ lived experiences and interpretations of racialized educational conditions with broader patterns of school choice. In doing so, it offers a more expansive account of school choice—one that considers not only what Black families seek in schools, but also the conditions they seek to avoid and the institutional environments they must navigate in pursuing educational opportunities for their children.

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

Wood, D., Warren, C.A., & Wellborn, C.P. (Forthcoming). Educator vision/ing, abolitionist perspectives, and the logics of Black educational transformation. Educational Researcher.

Warren, C. A. & Wood, D. (2023). Rupturing the Black-White binary: Critical race theory, mourning and pathways to racial justice. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education.

MANUSCRIPTS UNDER REVIEW AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

Warren, C.A., Wood, D., & Pruitt, T. (Revise and Resubmit). “It Just Feel Weird”: Navigating Adoption of Antiracist Restorative Practices as School Discipline Policy Reform.

Wood, D. (Under Review). Black School Choice as Refusal: The Political Context of Black Families’ School Choice.

James McGraw, K. & Wood, D. (Under Review). Return to Zero Tolerance? Examining State School Discipline Policy in the Post-COVID-19 Era.

Wood, D. & James McGraw, K. (In Preparation). Constructing Discipline: Antiblackness and the Politics of State School Discipline Policy.