Dr. Alexandra Aylward is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at Montana State University, Bozeman. In May of 2018, she completed a PhD at New York University in Sociology of Education with a focus on racial and ethnic inequities in PK-12 educational opportunity. Subsequently, she pursued postdoctoral research as a Strategic
Data Fellow through the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research. Dr. Aylward’s research investigates how school-level practices and policies generate and maintain racial/ethnic inequities in educational opportunity within the K-12 settings. Children’s educational opportunities are situated in a particular space and place, and within a complex nexus between the school, home, neighborhood, and policy contexts. Using advanced quantitative and mixed-methods approaches and multiple sources and levels of data, she examinse how the various contexts of school, family, neighborhood, and policy intersect, interact, or act independently to produce racialized outcomes in academic achievement, school discipline, and special education placement.