DE'JA WOOD - RESEARCH

De'Ja Wood's research examines how Black communities navigate educational policies and institutions in pursuit of educational environments that affirm Black students' dignity, safety, and humanity. Using qualitative and mixed methods approaches, her scholarship investigates how Black families, educators, and communities respond to anti-Black educational conditions while advancing more equitable and affirming possibilities for Black youth. In her scholarship, she bridges community-centered inquiry with rigorous policy research to examine how educational policies reproduce anti-Blackness and how Black communities navigate, challenge, and transform those conditions. Ultimately, her scholarship seeks to identify pathways toward more equitable and affirming educational systems.

Her research agenda consists of three interconnected strands: Black families, school choice, and educational decision-making; Black educational transformation and organizational change; and education policy, school discipline, and structural inequality. Across these areas, she employs qualitative and mixed methods approaches, including interviews, focus groups, case studies, policy analysis, and the analysis of large-scale administrative datasets. Her methodological approach is grounded in the belief that understanding educational inequality requires attention to both the lived experiences of Black communities and the structural conditions that shape those experiences. Through collaborative partnerships with schools, educators, families, and community organizations, her research seeks to produce scholarship that is both theoretically generative and practically relevant for education policy and practice.

Black Families, School Choice, and Educational Decision-Making

De'Ja's primary line of research examines how Black families navigate educational policies and schooling options within racialized educational landscapes. Her most recent project develops the concept of racialized risk assessments to explain how Black families weigh traditional indicators of school quality alongside the potential racial harms and protections different educational environments present. Through these assessments, Black families identify and pursue educational environments that affirm Black students' dignity, safety, and humanity while minimizing their exposure to anti-Black racial harm. This line of research also explores how broader political contexts—including school choice policies and shifting sociopolitical climates—influence Black families' school choices.

Black Educational Transformation and Organizational Change

A second strand of De'Ja's research examines the organizational conditions necessary for Black educational transformation. Through qualitative studies of schools implementing restorative justice and other equity-focused reforms, she investigates how educators make sense of organizational change and how competing visions of Black education shape reform efforts. Her work explores how schools move beyond policy change to cultivate organizational cultures that affirm Black students' dignity, belonging, and well-being. This line of research contributes to conversations about organizational learning, educational leadership, and policy implementation by examining how meaningful reform requires both structural change and a shared vision of Black educational justice.

Education Policy, School Discipline, and Structural Inequality

A third strand of De'Ja's research examines how education policies and institutional practices produce, sustain, or disrupt anti-Black racial harm. Her work investigates how policies related to school discipline, school governance, and educational reform shape Black students' educational experiences. Rather than treating policy as race neutral, she examines how policy design, implementation, and political context shape the opportunities available to Black communities. Through qualitative and mixed methods research, De'Ja seeks to identify how education policy can be reimagined to disrupt racialized inequities and support more affirming educational environments.

DISSERTATION

School choice is often framed as a race-neutral process in which families compare schools based on academic quality, resources, or convenience. Wood's dissertation challenges this assumption by examining how Black families make schooling decisions within educational systems shaped by anti-Blackness. The project asks a central question: How do Black families navigate school choice in educational environments where protecting Black children's dignity, safety, and humanity is an ongoing concern?

Drawing on BlackCrit and theories of refusal, De'Ja operationalizes the concept of racialized risk assessments to explain how Black families evaluate schools. Rather than relying solely on traditional indicators of school quality, she argues that Black families weigh the racialized risks and protections embedded within educational environments—including school climate, disciplinary practices, educator beliefs, racial representation, and students' sense of belonging—as they determine which schools are likely to promote their child(ren)'s wellbeing and minimize their child(ren)'s overexposure to anti-Black harm.

The dissertation employs an exploratory sequential mixed methods design that integrates qualitative interviews, focus groups, and participant journals with restricted statewide longitudinal administrative data from Missouri. Through this design, Wood examines both how Black families describe their school choice processes and the extent to which those decision-making processes are reflected in broader patterns of Black student mobility. This research contributes to scholarship on Black education, school choice, and education policy by centering Black families' decision-making, operationalizing racialized risk assessments as a framework for understanding Black school choice, and demonstrating how policies that overlook these considerations may unintentionally reproduce racial harm while expanding educational options. The dissertation has been supported by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Minority Dissertation Fellowship (2025), the AERA–National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant (2026), and the Bonsal Applied Education Research Award (2025).

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

Wood, D., Warren, C.A., & Wellborn, C.P. (Accepted). 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

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

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

Wood, D., James McGraw, K., & Welsh, R. (In Preparation). Disciplining Differently? Exploring States Beating the School Discipline Odds in the U.S.

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