In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. David Osworth discusses his experiences researching the intersections of educational policy and leadership for equity. Osworth is an Assistant Professor of Educational and Cultural Foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on anti-LGBTQ+ policy, school discipline disparity, and neoliberal educational policy. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
David Osworth: My scholarship—both at AERA 2026 and beyond—critically examines oppressive structures in education through a historical lens with the express intent of supporting progressive reform that is humanizing and liberatory. I do this, for example, in my recent scholarship on the political hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities. In a critical policy analysis of anti-transgender legislation in North Carolina, I situate the present hostility toward transgender communities against the backdrop of the histories of LGBTQ+ communities within the United States over the 20th century (Osworth & Edlin, 2025). This focus on history not only allows us to understand the current political moment as form of retrenchment (see McQuillan et al., 2022) but also provides a road map to highlight resistance movements that have found purchase in the struggle for equity and how to learn from those strategies to inform present-day policies and politics.
While this is a throughline of my scholarship, it is exemplified by the work I am presenting at this year’s annual conference. Continuing my work surrounding LGBTQ+ issues in education, I am presenting from a larger study on LGBTQ+ educational leaders. This study examines the experiences of 23 LGBTQ+ educational leaders from across the United States as they navigate the current political climate. In this paper, I specifically examine how support—or a lack of support—plays a role in how LGBTQ+ leaders navigate their work. The findings of this paper are set against the history of LGBTQ+ educators in the United States. This paper concludes by outlining how leaders envision the future for other LGBTQ+ leaders and how schools can be made more supportive spaces for LGBTQ+ communities.
Another presentation at this year’s annual conference also engages with history to interrogate the present state of charter schools in New Jersey. Building from previous work that conceptualizes charter schools as a form of racialized enclosure that continues the neoliberal disinvest in public goods (Osworth & Tanner, 2025), my coauthors and I present a spatial analysis of charter schools using census data. We find that charter schools in New Jersey are almost exclusively located in geographies that are urban, lower-income, and predominantly serve non-white families. We situate this finding within the work of Marxist and racial capitalism scholars. We underscore that this exploitative pattern of charter proliferation in the state is directly ties to the history of federal redlining and opportunity hoarding of affluent, white communities (Cashin, 2021; Rothstein, 2017).
LtC:What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
DO: My work aims to take a critical and interdisciplinary approach to educational research. I think that this is a major takeaway for the field as well as a commitment of the Educational Change SIG. In my recent work on school takeover in a rural school district, I interviewed Parents to better understand how they experienced the State’s intervention (Osworth, 2025, 2024). In this study, parents’ experiences illuminated counter-narratives about the takeover and complicated the State’s narrative about its progress. I think that these studies encapsulate a major takeaway from my scholarship as a whole. If we want to implement and enact change that meets the needs of the communities our schools serve, those communities must be included in the process. Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process while simultaneously relying on them to help implement the latest reforms. The findings from my scholarship point toward this reality. While the state education agency may say it includes parent feedback, parents’ experiences point in the opposite direction and demonstrate that trust and goodwill were destroyed in the process.
“Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process…”
Scholars and practitioners in educational change should therefore look toward centering community and family knowledge in the process of planning for change—not simply relegating them to be a tool to leverage in the journey for change. This moves from a more transactional view toward a more community-engaged and dialogic approach (see Freire, 1970/2018). My scholarship draws on the work of critical philosophers and thinkers, and I believe that those engaged in educational change need to prioritize the use of these theories, as bell hooks (1994) called for, making theory the cornerstone of liberatory practice.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
DO: More than ever, the field of educational change must remain firmly grounded in a commitment to equity. Current resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts disproportionately affects individuals from non-dominant identity groups, including—but not limited to—those marginalized by ability, socioeconomic status, gender, language, race, and sexuality. This contemporary moment of retrenchment (see Crenshaw, 1988) poses significant obstacles to efforts aimed at fostering socially just learning environments for all students. I view both my own scholarly work and the broader field as continuing to advance a justice-centered agenda—one that prioritizes the well-being of children and works toward realizing the democratic ideals upon which public education is founded.
At the same time, I am energized by the possibilities for engaging in theoretically robust scholarship within educational change. Concerns are often raised about a perceived disconnect between theory and practice, or about theory-driven research that lacks practical applicability. Yet I see the field at an especially promising juncture for meaningful praxis. Critical theoretical frameworks that offer important analytical tools for addressing today’s equity challenges also explicitly call for action. What is particularly compelling is the opportunity to pursue intellectually rigorous work that simultaneously informs how we act upon research insights. As educators and scholars continue to confront the complex, “wicked” problems facing education, it will be essential to do so through collaborative, community-engaged approaches that integrate theory and practice in purposeful ways. As we respond to the current political moment, I hope to see the field of educational change to keep these commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion as political pressure continues to mount for us to abandon these lines of inquiry and practice.
References
Cashin, S. (2021). White space, Black hood: Opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality. Beacon Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331-1387.
hooks, b. (1993). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury.
McQuillan, M. T., Eckes, S., Lewis, M. (2022). A solution in search of a problem: Justice demands more for trans student-athletes to fulfill the promise of Title IX. Marquette Sports Law Review, 33(1), 195-228.
Osworth, D. (2024). Cooperation or conquest: A case study of school takeover. Power and Education, 18(1), 50-64. https://doi.org/10.1177/17577438241304391
Osworth, D. (2025). “Prepare yourself for the change”: Counternarratives of parents experiencing state takeover. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2025.2601552
Osworth, D. & Edlin, M. (2025). The Political Construction of Anti-Transgender Policy: A Critical Policy Analysis of North Carolina State Legislators’ Discursive Formations. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 2(2). 1-11. https://doi.org/10.60808/ren9-ak07
Osworth, D. & Tanner, M.N. (2025). From public good to private gain: Charter schools and the racialized enclosure of public education. The Urban Review, 57(4), 833-854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-025-00744-w
Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Company.






































