Dr. Erica Frankenberg

Erica Frankenberg (Ed.D., Harvard University) is a professor of education and demography in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also an affiliate faculty member at Penn State Law, and research associate for the Population Research Institute. She serves as Associate Director of the Penn State Social Science Research Institute. Her research interests focus on racial desegregation and inequality in K-12 schools, and the connections between school segregation and other metropolitan policies. Given demographic, legal, and political changes, her work focuses on policy design and extralegal factors affecting school segregation. This includes the extent to which boundary lines between and within districts divide populations and students; how the design of school choice policies relates to racial and economic segregation of students; studying the intersection of housing and school composition; and examining the complex patterns of segregation and inequality emerging in suburban school districts. She examines demographic and political contexts within which schools are situated, how this context affects stratification, and the implementation of policies aimed at ameliorating racial segregation, including school choice and boundaries. Important for equitably sustaining education policies, she also studies linkages with other social policies, including housing, transportation and health policies. Dr. Frankenberg has published widely in education journals, law reviews, and has co-edited five books. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and W.T. Grant Foundation, among others.

At Penn State, Dr. Frankenberg was the co-founder and now director of Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights, which seeks to use research to inform policy and law to expand access to educational opportunity and reduce racial inequality in education. Prior to coming to Penn State, she was the director for the Initiative on School Integration for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. In addition to publishing about school segregation and extra-legal factors that structure segregation and access to opportunity, she has been involved with communities, including through legal cases, to use research to inform legal and policy decisions for racial equity in K-12 schools. Her research has been cited in U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including the most recent case on voluntary integration where she co-authored a social science statement describing the benefits of integrated schools signed by over 500 social scientists. She has also served as an integration consultant for federally-funded equity assistance center, and as an expert witness for at least a dozen school desegregation cases for the U.S. Justice Department and for private Black plaintiffs represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Working with district leadership, she has helped to design one of the country’s largest voluntary integration policies, using choice and geographic zones. She has also co-planned voluntary integration convenings for stakeholders with the U.S. Department of Education and spoken at Congressional briefings federal officials about relevant research for diversity policy proposals and implementation. She serves as the only researcher on Connecticut’s statewide advisory committee regarding one of the nation’s leading school desegregation cases.

She received her A.B. from Dartmouth College, majoring in education policy, and graduated from the Mobile County (Alabama) Public Schools, where she attended a magnet school created as part of the court-ordered desegregation remedy.