Jal Mehta

Assistant Professor of Education

Profile

Jal Mehta is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His primary research interests are in understanding the relationship between knowledge and action; substantively he is most interested in the policy and politics of creating high quality schooling at scale. His dissertation, The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980-2001, recently received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the AERA politics’ section. He is a co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, which was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. He is currently working on a book charting the growing “rationalization” of American schooling, asking what this shift means for the educational field, for the teaching profession, and for social justice. He is also working on a project, The Chastened Dream, about the limits and possibilities of using social science as a means of achieving social progress. Jal received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University.

Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University