Gail L. Sunderman

Gail L. Sunderman is a senior research associate in K–12 Education for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Her research focuses on educational policy and politics, and urban school reform, including the development and implementation of education policy and the impact of policy on the educational opportunities for at-risk students. At the Civil Rights Project, she is project director on a five-year study examining the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and is coauthor of the book, NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field, also from Corwin Press. Prior research includes studies on the implementation of Title I schoolwide programs, governance reform in the Chicago Public Schools, and understanding institutional and organizational constraints on implementing school reform initiatives. Her work has appeared in Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Educational Researcher. She is a former Fulbright scholar and received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.