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Jennifer Lee Jennings is an American sociologist and education researcher. She is a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research, and a Research Associate of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. She is also the Director of the Education Research Section (ERS). Her research interests are racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes and her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, and Social Science Research journals.

Career
Jennings graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly known as the. Woodrow Wilson School) and a certificate from the Teacher Preparation Program in Social Studiesin 2000. Advised by Marta Tienda, she wrote her senior thesis on the implementation of whole-school reform in New Jersey's urban school districts. Having completed her student-teaching requirements in the Trenton area while still at Princeton, she returned as a full-time Social Studies teacher in the public school system after graduation. She went on to earn a Master of Philosophy in Education from the University of Cambridge, UK and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University with distinction in 2009. During this time, she received the Sociology of Education’s David Lee Stevenson Graduate Student Paper Award in 2004. Her dissertation examined how government accountability systems evaluating schools on student outcomes affected education inequality. She later became a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University in 2009 and expanded her research to investigate the relationship between early health and educational outcomes along with the effects of community-level shocks on population health. In 2011, Jennings was appointed as an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education and as a faculty affiliate with the Global Institute of Public Health. She was awarded the Golden Dozen Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2015 from the New York University College of Arts & Science. She joined Princeton University as a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs in the summer of 2017 where she is a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research and a Research Associate of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. She is also the Director of the Education Research Section (ERS), an interdisciplinary unit within The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and she served as a Service Focus faculty member through the PACE Center for Civic Engagement from 2018 to 2019. She has previously taught undergraduate courses in sociology and graduate courses on economic perspectives of inequality, education policy, and techniques and methods of social science. Her other positions include being a Research Advisory Board Member at the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 2017 to 2018. She has received grants and awards from the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Overdeck Education Innovation Fund, and The Heckscher Foundation for Children.

Eduwonkette
After handing in her dissertation proposal during her final year as a graduate student at Columbia University, Jennings started an anonymous blog titled Eduwonkette. She used it as a place to vocalize her frustrations with what she was learning about education reforms, specifically how the relevant information she was exposed to in class never seemed to enter public debates, and as a platform to summarize research on schools for a wider audience. This came at a time when then-Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, was revamping the city’s public school system in hopes of swaying Albany to renew mayoral control of the system the following year.

Using the alias of Eduwonkette to preserve her anonymity, because blogging was seen as "unserious" in the academy at the time, Jennings published her first blog post in September 2007.Her posts began as detailed analyses of administrative education data but as the blog progressed, Eduwonkette also began calling out the failure of policymakers to take research into account in order to steer their work accordingly. This was spurred by the responses she was seeing to Bloomberg’s takeover of New York City schools. Although she sometimes stood with the Department of Education on its policies, she was also very vocal about which ones she disagreed with. Her blog ended up attracting the attention of many experts and the media, and was ultimately picked up by the Education Week website.

Despite its popularity, Eduwonkette received as much praise as criticism. For example, education historian Diane Ravitch called her work “brilliant” and demographer Andrew Beveridge lauded the quality of her work.{{ref}ny mag}}{{ref}ny sun}} She was also admired for her ability to debunk multiple education reforms in the short amount of time that Eduwonkette was active. However, a major point of contention was the anonymous nature of the blog. In its first year, the New York Sun described the blog as a “stubborn thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side.” Similarly, co-founder of the Bellwether Education Partners think tank Andrew J. Rotherham and NYCDOE press secretary David Cantor criticized Eduwonkette for potentially pretending to be unbiased in order to mask her own interests in the public education debate or to build up her reputation in light of her “aggressive” statistical interpretations. Another issue raised by Eduwonkette’s anonymity was that it undermined the public's right to know the identities, and thereby biases, of participants in education debates. Education Week, the paper hosting Eduwonkette’s blog, eventually also came under attack. With the commotion the blog stirred up, attempts to guess Edwonkette’s identity ensued. Speculations included Eduwonkette belonging to the city teachers union or possibly being the director of NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy Amy Ellen Schwartz.

A story in New York magazine revealed Eduwonkette to be Jennings in August of 2008. Jennings said that she decided to come forward as the author of Eduwonkette once she realized that other researchers were being wrongly pointed at. She believed this could have negative implications for their relationships with the Department of Education and their ability to gain data for future work. She also stated that she wanted to reveal her identity on her own terms since it was only a matter of time before she was exposed. The blog came to an end on January 26, 2009, when Jennings uploaded her last post announcing that she was “hanging up her cape” to join the sociology department at New York University.

During the time it was active, Eduwonkette featured over 150 blog posts and multiple guest bloggers including Michael Klonsky, William Ayers, and Sol Stern.

Current Work
Jennings’ research centers on the effects of multiple educational policies, including accountability, teacher evaluation systems, and school choice, on racial, socioeconomic, and gender inequality in education and health outcomes. She also studies the long-term impacts of high school on college matriculation, graduation, and adult earnings. She is currently writing a book titled Why Schools Matter: The Impact of Schools on Children’s Life Chances, which is co-authored by David Deming and Christopher Jencks. It will synthesize results from a randomized intervention study of 55,000 middle school students in New York City that she launched in 2014 with collaborators Sarah Cohodes, Sean Corcoran, and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj called the NYC High School Choice Admissions Study. Funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, it examines the effect of providing informational materials and support to students choosing where to apply to high school and whether that changes the school decisions their families make. Jennings presented some of the study's preliminary results when she headlined the second installment of the Center for Education Policy Research’s seminar series at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2017. She stated that, unlike the common assumption that New York City middle school students are limited to their local neighborhood school, the NYC High School Admissions Study showed that students from lower-income neighborhoods actually traveled further for school, on average.

Along with her work on school choice, Jennings has also launched a project titled “UnleadED: A Proposal to Measure Trenton Lead-Water Levels at Scale,” after winning the 2019 faculty research award at Princeton University. Jennings and her co-principal investigator, John A. Higgins, will lead an interdisciplinary team analyzing water samples collected from Trenton, New Jersey with the goal of assessing the prevalence of lead contamination across the city. Through partnerships with teachers in Trenton public schools, Jennings and Higgins will distribute water testing kits to students who will take samples from their homes and link them with their individual addresses. By doing so, the researchers will be able to identify areas with heightened levels of contamination and work with affected households to report it, and begin working towards minimizing their lead exposure. The project also assists Trenton teachers by providing them with training, resources, and lesson plans for their students regarding lead exposure and how to avoid it. Their findings will be published on a website to be accessed by families seeking information on their water quality and build on Higgins’ ongoing project to create a low-cost water lead test for Trenton residents.

Jennings has previously spoken at Harvard University's Reexamining Inequality conference in 2013 where she delivered a presentation titled “The Summer Drug Holiday and Academic Pressure” as well as at the 50th-anniversary celebration of Princeton’s Teacher Preparation Program in 2019 with her keynote speech, “Be the Early Worm: Reasons for Educational Optimism in Uncertain Times.” She was also commissioned along with several other scholars by the American Academy of Art and Sciences to evaluate the current state of undergraduate education through the Future of Undergraduate Education project in 2015. She has been featured in Princeton’s Policy Podcast, where she was a guest on the segment “Education for All,” and most recently, on the Early Childhood Education Decisions and Choices panel at the 46th Annual Association for Education Finance and Policy Conference: Promoting Equity and Opportunity Through Education Policy Research.