Black Girls Vote, a nonprofit organization designed to boost voter turnout in Baltimore, was recently featured in the Baltimore Sun. In the article, Kate Drabinski, a lecturer of gender and women’s studies and director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) program, provided perspective on the organization’s potential far reaching impact heading into the 2016 election season.

The group was founded by a Baltimore resident with the goal of registering people to vote, especially young African-American women, and to use the nonprofit to aid public schools, the job market and access to health care. The organization is made up of 15 core members, and several pop-up events are being planned to help residents register throughout the year.

In the article, Drabinski described how involvement from minority groups in shaping public policy can help change lives.

“There are incredible efforts made to get wealthy white people to vote — whole systems to remind them how important their vote is,” Drabinski said. “You need the same kind of attention to other groups.

“Without participation, the wrong decisions will be made. It’s an old tenet: ‘Nothing about us without us.'”

Drabinski’s research interests include transgender studies, critical pedagogy, public history, and theories of activism. Each year in the spring, Drabinski leads the Elect Her! program, which is a training program that encourages college women to run for student government on their college or university campuses. Read more about Drabinski’s work and research. Read the full article “Black Girls Vote looks to get young women to the polls” in the Baltimore Sun. 

F. Chris Curran, an assistant professor in UMBC’s School of Public Policy, has been named an Emerging Education Policy Scholar for 2015-16 by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. The Emerging Education Policy Scholars (EEPS) program is a select group of promising, new Ph.D. scholars and candidates who present innovative research ideas and demonstrate an enthusiasm for education policy.

As part of the program, Curran will join think-tankers, academics, policymakers, and reformers in Washington, D.C. during the upcoming year to bridge connections with senior education policy experts and K-12 education practitioners. The program is designed to cultivate talent within education research, create opportunities to share research ideas, and enhance understanding of the intersections between policy and practice with education research.

“The primary purpose of my work is to produce high-quality research that contributes to the improvement of educational outcomes for students,” shares Curran. “Being selected as an Emerging Education Policy Scholar is an exciting opportunity to advance this goal as it provides the opportunity to forge relationships with other emerging researchers as well as to build connections with senior policymakers in the field.”

Professor Curran joined the School of Public Policy in August 2015. He has research interests in education policy, early childhood education, school discipline and safety, teacher labor markets, and politics of education. He has recently published a Baltimore Sun op-ed about educational opportunity in Baltimore and a column about teacher overtime policy in Education Week.

Curran is one of just 20 scholars selected for the program nationwide. Read more about this year’s EEPS cohort on theThomas B. Fordham Institute website. Learn more about the specific goals of the program.

Image: Chris Curran presents talk at UMBC about his research. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.