Attending unsafe schools can be an especially pernicious aspect of the opportunity gap, particularly for racially minoritized students. Often closely paired with concerns about school safety is school security which is intended to make schools safer but is often linked with increased fear or as part of the school-to-prison pipeline. My work seeks to understand the root causes of why students feel unsafe, how to support students feeling safer, and evaluating the most visible solutions schools adopt in the name of student safety: school security. My research in this area has been supported by the National Institute of Justice Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, the Institute of Education Sciences in the US Department of Education, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The majority of my work evaluating policies to increase the high school graduation rate focuses on online credit recovery (OCR). OCR refers to online courses students take to make up course credit they did not receive due to course failure. OCR represents a new alternative to the traditional option of repeating a course face-to-face (F2F). OCR has the potential to either be a lifeline for students who have failed courses by increasing their chances of graduating from high school or harm these students by depriving them of high-quality instruction if OCR courses are low quality. My research examines the effects of OCR on students and schools and how to effectively design school-level structures to support equitable OCR implementation. My OCR research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation.

​My recent work on all three research areas has integrated critical theories as the guiding conceptual framework including critical race theory, QuantCrit, and theories related to White educational spaces.