Michele S. Moses

Professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice, University of Colorado

Michele Moses is Professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice, faculty fellow of the Center for Values and Social Policy and the National Center for Education Policy, and affiliate faculty of Ethnic Studies and of Women’s and Gender Studies. She has served as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies of the School of Education since 2011.

Professor Moses is a philosopher of education who is centrally concerned with education policy studies, especially as related to race, ethnicity, and equality of educational opportunity. Her research has investigated the roots of the political debates over race-conscious policies that profoundly affect meaningful opportunities for higher education, with a focus on the nature of persistent moral disagreement over affirmative action. She has studied how college access and outreach programs affect low income students’ social capital and social contexts of choice, and is currently working on philosophical/empirical research into the moral tensions around movements to opt out of different aspects of public education, and on philosophical work on what makes a disagreement “reasonable.”

Although her work primarily has used philosophical inquiry, she has used both quantitative and qualitative methods when the research questions have warranted broader inquiry and analyses. For example, she has conducted research concerned with how voters understand race-conscious education policy, which used both survey research and qualitative interview and media content analyses.

Professor Moses teaches courses such as Higher Education in the US, Theoretical Issues in Education Policy, Philosophy of Education, and Gender Issues in Education.

Her work has appeared in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review, and Journal of Social Philosophy. She has presented her work in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United States. In addition, Dr. Moses is the author of Embracing Race: Why We Need Race-Conscious Education Policy (Teachers College Press, 2002), co-editor of Affirmative Action Matters: Creating Opportunities for Students around the World (Routledge, 2014), and Living with Moral Disagreement: The Enduring Controversy about Affirmative Action (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Professor Moses’ editorial experience includes a current term as Associate Editor for Educational Theory, a term as Associate Editor for the Section on Social and Institutional Analysis of the American Educational Research Journal, Reviews Editor for the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and the Editorial Advisory Board Member of Education Policy Analysis Archives. She currently serves on AERA’s Executive Board, AERA Council, and as a fellow of the National Education Policy Center.