Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership, University of Alabama
Heewon Jang was a doctoral student in educational policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the fellowship from the Karr Family Scholarship and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies. Prior to her doctoral training, she received a bachelor’s degree in Education and Statistics and a master’s in the Sociology of Education from Korea University.
Her research focuses on the patterns and consequences of residential and school segregation in relation to racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. She is also interested in how policy interventions can increase educational opportunities for the disadvantaged. She uses a variety of quantitative methods to study how school and neighborhood contexts affect academic performance of students from different racial and economic backgrounds and whether the impact of these contexts can be moderated by educational policy.
Her current project investigates the concentration of racial minority students into schools with higher poverty rates, which is the strongest predictor of racial achievement gaps. In this project, she provides a thorough descriptive study on this concentration of racial and economic disadvantages and explores the most efficient strategy to reduce it via student assignment policy.