Kara Finnigan
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Kara S. Finnigan is an accomplished academic leader whose career spans schools, nonprofits, think tanks, philanthropy, and higher education institutions. She currently serves as associate dean for faculty and student development at the University of Michigan's Marsal Family School of Education, where she leads institution-wide efforts to advance faculty and student success, inclusive hiring and mentoring practices, and organizational culture, and is a professor in the Education Studies program, teaching courses in education policy, sociology of education, politics of education, and research methods. She was recently selected as a 2026-27 fellow in the Academic Leadership Program (ALP) of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
Dr. Finnigan joined the Educational Studies faculty in 2022 and served a 2-year term as senior vice president of the Spencer Foundation from 2022-2024. During that same time, she served as editor-in-chief of AERA Open, the flagship open-access journal of the American Educational Research Association, directing a team of six co-editors, fifteen associate editors, and two managing editors, and increasing the methodological diversity, broadening the author base, and increasing journal impact (including both submission growth and citation growth). Before that, she was a professor at the University of Rochester for 19 years where she served as chair of the Research Policy Committee of the Faculty Senate and director of the Education Policy Programs. As the inaugural distinguished equity, inclusion, and social transformation fellow at the University of Rochester’s Office of Equity and Inclusion, she oversaw a $1 million strategic incentive fund and led university-wide efforts on faculty diversity, retention, and public engagement.
Prior to her work in higher education, she was engaged in educational research and evaluation at SRI International, RPP International, and the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Her early work in education included working as a substitute teacher and in nonprofits focused on foster youth and developmentally disabled youth and adults after working in book publishing (Penguin Books) and development and alumni engagement (The New School) in NYC.
Dr. Finnigan has studied educational policies and programs at the local, state, and federal level for more than 30 years. She has written extensively about high-stakes accountability and school choice and focuses on issues of racial justice and equity in policy design, implementation, and outcomes. Her research blends perspectives in education, sociology, and political science and employs both qualitative and quantitative methods, including social network analysis and GIS mapping. She is currently studying connections between education and housing policies; social movements around integration in metropolitan areas; and the social networks of educational leaders around research evidence.
A prolific researcher, Dr. Finnigan has secured competitive research funding from sources including the WT Grant Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, and the American Institutes for Research. She has published articles in top tier peer-reviewed journals such as American Educational Research Journal and Teachers College Record, as well as practitioner-oriented journals such as American Educator, District Administration, and Poverty & Race. She has published two edited volumes and co-authored Striving in Common: A Regional Equity Framework for Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press). Her scholarship on educational equity, school district leadership, and organizational networks has shaped both academic and policy conversations, with commentary featured in the Washington Post and on PBS NewsHour. Her scholarly leadership has been recognized at the highest levels of her field: she is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association—distinctions reserved for a small fraction of scholars nationally. She currently chairs AERA's Fellows Committee and the WT Grant Foundation’s Institutional Challenge Grant Panel and has chaired multiple review panels for the Institute of Education Sciences.
She holds a PhD in educational policy studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an MA from Stanford University, and a BA from Dartmouth College.