Dr. Jo Smith is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership, where she is Program Director for the D.Ed. program. Jo teaches a variety of courses across EMPL and CoE programs, including writing, policy, organization theory, and qualitative methods courses. She explores the links between policy, leadership, and the improvement of schools and school systems, examining the policy conditions that foster successful reform by the spectrum of system actors. Jo began her education career as an English and ESL teacher at an Islamic high school in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, Jo was a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. She has been at UO since 2013.
Ph.D., 2004, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Major: Educational Policy and Administration
Graduate Diploma in Education, 1997, University of Melbourne, Australia
English and ESL
B.A., 1996, Haverford College, Pennsylvania
Major: English
2016, Excellence in Teaching - Early Career Award, University of Oregon College of Education.
(* indicates student under my mentorship)
Smith, J. & *Gasparian, H. (2018, Spring). Development of a 50-state typology of education governance, International Journal of Educational Reform, 27(2), 127-155.
Smith, J. & *Thier, M. (2017). Challenges to Common Core State Standards implementation: Views from six states. NASSP Bulletin, 101(3), 169-187.
*Thier, M., Smith, J., *Anderson, R. & *Pitts, C. (2016). Influential spheres: Examining actors’ perceptions of education governance, International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership, 11(9).
*Anderson, R., *Guerreiro, M., & Smith. J. (2016). Are all biases bad? Collaborative grounded theory in developmental evaluation of education policy. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 12 (27), 44-57.
Wohlstetter, P., Smith, J. & *Farrell, C. C. (2015). The choices and challenges of charter schools, revisited. Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, 9(1), 115-138.
*Farrell, C., *Nayfack, M., Smith, J. & Wohlstetter, P. (2013). One size does not fit all: Understanding the variation in charter management scale-up. Journal of Educational Change, 15(1), 77-97.
Wohlstetter, P., Smith, J. & Gallagher, A. (2013). New York City’s Children First Networks: Turning accountability on its head. Journal of Educational Administration, 51(4), 528-549.
Dr. Smith's research uses qualitative methods to explore the links between educational policy, leadership, and the improvement of schools and school systems. Her primary focus is the policy conditions that foster successful reform by educational leaders, defined broadly to encompass the decision-making roles played by the spectrum of system actors including (in some contexts) teachers, parents, school leaders, board members, and district and state administrators. As such, her work explores three levels of the education system: schools, districts, and states and has included studies of site-based management, charter schools, district responses to state budget reallocation, parent involvement, state education governance structures and policies, school-based governance, school networks, public-private partnerships in education, and the use of categorical funding. Dr. Smith's work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement as well as a number of foundations and policy organizations, including the Weingart Foundation, the Center for American Progress, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. In 2014, she received funding from the UO College of Education to work with a group of EMPL students analyzing Oregon’s preparedness to implement the Smarter Balanced Assessment System. In 2015, she received funding from the Qatar National Research Fund to spend ten days in the country’s international education hub, Education City, to build collaboration for a study examining the experiences of female Qatari Education City students and alumnae.