UW–Madison’s Henry named 2025 Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education


UW–Madison’s Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr., an associate professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA), has been honored as a 2025 Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

Henry

Henry’s scholarship investigates the politics of education, with a particular focus on school choice and market-based approaches. His work critically examines the intersections of charter schools and the charter school authorization process, political economy and neoliberalism, anti-Blackness, and Black educational thought and efforts towards justice.

An article in Diverse highlights Henry’s transformative journey, which began during his undergraduate years at Tulane University. There, he encountered the influential scholarship of Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita with the UW–Madison School of Education who previously held the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education. Ladson-Billings’ work helped Henry understand “the disconnect between his teacher training and the lived experiences of Black students, including his own,” and inspired him to pursue a career in education rather than law.

Later, Henry was assigned Ladson-Billings as a mentor while attending a summer research program at UW–Madison. Describing the mentorship as “a match made in heaven,” Henry credits this experience with influencing his decision to pursue a PhD in curriculum and instruction at UW–Madison, from which he graduated in 2016.

After serving on the faculty at the University of Arizona, Henry returned to UW–Madison in 2020 to join the ELPA faculty.

Impressed by Henry’s scholarship, Ladson-Billings nominated him as an Emerging Scholar:

“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,” she says. “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.”

Read more about Henry’s scholarship and journey in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

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