Online Faculty and Staff Directory

310B Rackley

Campus: University Park

Departments: Education Policy Studies, Children, Youth, and Families Consortium
Programs: Educational Leadership, Sociology

Dr. Schafft is an assistant professor of education at The Pennsylvania State University based within the Educational Leadership Program. He comes to Penn State from Cornell University where he received his Ph.D. in Development Sociology in 2003. His research interests broadly concern the relationship between social inequality, spatial inequality and rural development. His current work examines housing insecurity and chronic residential mobility among poor households, and how such mobility may be understood as both a consequence of community disadvantage, as well as a factor reproducing that disadvantage. Dr. Schafft has also conducted research on the determinants of rural childhood obesity, youth aspirations and rural brain drain, and the role of schools in rural community development. Dr. Schafft directs the College's Center for Rural Education and Communities and serves as editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education.