Department of Education

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Mahasan Chaney

Assistant Professor of Education
mahasan_chaney@brown.edu
Room 223
Research Profile
Spring 2025 Office Hours On Sabbatical, 2024-2025

Biography

Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley in 2019 and was later a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) and the Watson Institute at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on education policy, and the history of education and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, the politics of school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of federal education reform.

Recent News

Journal of Urban History

Disciplining Our Own: Politicizing the Image of the Strict Black Principals, 1970-1985

Between the 1970s and 1980s, a bipartisan group of philanthropists, educational researchers, and eventually the Ronald Reagan administration politicized the image of the strict Black school disciplinarian as the key to urban school turnaround. In this article, Professor Mahasan Chaney writes about this image became a substitute for (more expensive) structural urban school reforms and how this idea demonstrates that discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970.
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Brown University YouTube

Ed Faculty Flash Talks: Mahasan Chaney

Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education. Her research and teaching focus on education policy and the history of education, and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, the politics of school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of education reform.
Read Article