Andrew Penner

During the fellowship year Andrew Penner will examine the longer-term consequences of educational efforts to support historically marginalized students and students with unique learning needs. Although education is supposed to facilitate human flourishing, existing data infrastructure rarely permits us to examine how specific educational policies and practices support or constrain long-term thriving. As a CASBS fellow, Penner will leverage unique administrative data infrastructure to understand how a variety of school-based initiatives (e.g., restorative justice and special education programs) can shape student trajectories.

Penner is a professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

His work examines how society creates categories and sorts people into them, and focuses on the consequences of these categorization processes for inequality. In a recent book, Schooled and Sorted (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023), Penner argues that understanding schools in terms of the categories that they create helps explain how schools can be egalitarian organizations that create inequality, and highlights how we can build categories that create a more equitable future.