About JKD

Jamel K. Donnor, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Education with affiliations in American Studies and the Center for Racial & Social Justice at William & Mary.

 

Professor Donnor is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies law, American Education, and the experiences of Black people in the United States.

 

Dr. Donnor has served as a rebuttal expert in Clark v. State Public Charter School Authority.

 

He is engaged in two groundbreaking research projects. The first project, titled “The Long Running War: How the U.S. Supreme Court Ensures White Supremacy in American Education” is a collaboration with Ms. Vania Blaiklock, Esq., and examines the long-term impact of the high Court’s decision on judicial theory and racial equality as a result of not ordering immediate school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

 

His second research project, “The Black Valedictorian Project,” is based upon previous work on school desegregation and the schooling experiences of Black female students in Cleveland, Mississippi. A sociolegal historical project, the Black Valedictorian Project pushes back against the insidious myth of Black intellectual inferiority in America by critically examining the relationship between race, educational opportunity, academic achievement, and notions of merit.

 

Professor Donnor has been quoted in major media outlets such as USA Today, The 74, The Conversation, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mississippi Free Press, OZY, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has also shared his expertise on several social media platforms, including Black Politics Today, Evening Words with Nick Taliaferro, and UJIMA Pan African Media Archives (UPAMA).

 

His research and scholarship have appeared in Education Policy, the Peabody Journal of Education, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Teachers College Record, Equity & Excellence in Education, Urban Education, and Race, Ethnicity and Education.

 

Professor Donnor has coedited five books, including Scandals in College Sports, Critical Race Theory in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song (2nd, ed,), The Charter School Solution: Distinguishing Fact from Rhetoric, and The Resegregation of Schools: Race and Education in the Twenty-First Century.

 

He is a recipient of the Derrick Bell Legacy Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA), and a Black Legacies Honoree from the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University.

 

Professor Donnor earned B.A. in Social Studies from Washington State University then an M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs from The Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is originally from Brooklyn, New York, and currently resides in Williamsburg, Virginia with his wife Andrea Mitchell Donnor and daughter Bailey “BK” Donnor.