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Title: Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tenured: Yes
Age: 36
Education: B.A., Political Science, Tulane University; Ph.D., Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Career mentors: Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dr. Carl Grant, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dr. Maisha Winn, Stanford University; Dr. Michael Cunningham, Tulane University; Dr. Nghana Lewis, Tulane University; Dr. Colleen Capper, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty: “Run your race and remember your ‘why.’ Remember why you got into this.”
Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., a recently tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Leadership and Policy Analysis, exemplifies how personal experience can shape academic pursuits and social justice advocacy.
Growing up in New Orleans as a “Katrina baby,” Henry witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of the hurricane on his community, particularly in education where Black teachers were dismissed en masse—what he describes as “one of the largest displacements of Black educators since Brown vs Board of Education.”
Initially planning to become a civil rights attorney, Henry’s path took an unexpected turn during his undergraduate years at Tulane University. As a pre-service teacher taking education courses, he encountered the scholarly work of Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, which helped him make sense of the disconnect between his teacher training and the lived experiences of Black students, including his own. This intellectual awakening led him to pursue a career in education rather than law, though he maintains that he “accidentally fell into the academy.”
His journey to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he would eventually become both student and professor, was equally serendipitous. As an undergraduate, Henry applied to a summer research opportunity program, writing his application essay about culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory from his dorm room, unaware that Ladson-Billings herself was at Wisconsin. When he was accepted and assigned Ladson-Billings as his mentor, it proved to be “a match made in heaven.” The experience profoundly influenced his decision to pursue his PhD at Wisconsin, where he found an intellectual home that allowed him to explore questions about policy, charter schools, race, and school reform.
After completing his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction in 2016, Henry joined the faculty at the University of Arizona, where his understanding of race in America was enriched by exposure to border state dynamics and the intersection of Black, Indigenous, and Mexican communities. His time in Arizona coincided with significant debates over ethnic studies in education, providing him with firsthand experience of educational activism and resistance.
Henry returned to Wisconsin in June 2020, amid the pandemic and social upheaval, but this time as a faculty member in the Leadership and Policy Analysis program. Despite the unusual circumstance of teaching at his alma mater, Henry has been embraced as a colleague rather than a former student, enabling him to chart his own intellectual path while contributing to the institution’s scholarly tradition.
Ladson-Billings says that she has been impressed by Henry’s scholarly pursuits.
“Since completing his dissertation Dr. Henry has continued to write about charter school authorization and the inequitable ways that Educational Management Organizations (EMOS) are awarded charters over the applications of community-based groups who tend to represent poor and working-class families whose children will actually attend the schools they propose,” says Ladson-Billings, who nominated Henry as an Emerging Scholar. “A second strand of Dr. Henry’s work also looks at the intersection of identity—racial, sexual orientation, and class. He looks at the complexity of intersectionality, e.g. Black, queer, poor students, to determine how educational futures are regularly compromised because of these status characteristics.”
Henry is completing a Spencer Foundation-funded project examining Black educators’ experiences in charter schools. This research is particularly timely given the expected expansion of school choice programs and the ongoing push to recruit more Black teachers. His work delves into crucial questions about retention, working conditions, and the importance of allowing Black teachers to maintain their autonomy and cultural teaching practices. He contextualizes today’s challenges within historical patterns, noting that current anti-Black sentiment and resistance to progressive education reforms mirror similar reactions to previous advances in civil rights. Despite the frustrating political climate, he remains grounded in what he calls “things eternal,” drawing strength from historical precedent and ancestral wisdom.
His own educational journey provides insight into the institutions he now studies. As an undergraduate at Tulane, Henry experienced firsthand the town-gown divide in New Orleans, describing the university as a place that “haunted New Orleans, but was not really there for most New Orleanians except for the ability to work there as a custodian or as someone in food service.”
He describes our present moment as “saturated with anti-Blackness” and “heteropatriarchy,” yet frames these challenges within a larger historical pattern of progress and backlash.