Dr. Terah Chambers, Associate Dean
Dr. Terah Venzant Chambers is a professor of K-12 Educational Administration in the MSU College of Education. She joined The Graduate School as Associate Dean in Fall 2022 and is thrilled to contribute to a variety of programs that will foster graduate student success, including Emergency Fellowship Funding, Advance to Adventure (ATA), Academic Achievement Graduate Assistantships (AAGA), King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowships (KCP-FFF), Prospective Doctoral Student Recruitment and Retention, Ruth Simms Hamilton TIAA Graduate Merit Fellowship, and the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society (BGHS). She will also be working with Steven Thomas to support the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP).
Dr. Venzant Chambers’ research interests include post-Brown K-12 education policy and urban education leadership. Specifically, she is interested in the ways within-school segregative policies influence African American students’ academic achievement and school engagement, as well as the price of school success for high-achieving students of color (racial opportunity cost). Her 2022 book, Racial Opportunity Cost: The Toll of Academic Success on Black and Latinx Students is available from Harvard Education Press. Venzant Chambers is past president of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). She currently serves as co-editor of AERA Open and has previously served as associate editor for Educational Administration Quarterly, the Journal of Teacher Education, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She has an expertise in qualitative research methodology, particularly critical approaches to research methods and theory. At MSU, Venzant Chambers was selected as an Academic Advancement Network (AAN) Fellow (2020-2021) and a Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Academic Leadership Program (ALP) Fellow (2021-2022). She previously served as a Congressional Fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF) with placements in the Office of Rep. Diane E. Watson (retired) and the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Chambers also serves in an elected position on the East Lansing School Board.
