Na’ilah Suad Nasir

Board Secretary

Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the sixth President of the Spencer Foundation, which funds education research nationally. She has held a faculty appointment in Education and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion. She also served on the Faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Education from 2000 to 2008. Nasir’s research examines the racialized and cultural nature of learning and schooling, with a particular focus on the experiences of African American students in schools and communities. In her co-edited book, We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys, Nasir explores the teaching practices and organization of the African American Male Initiative in Oakland, the first district-wide initiative of it’s kind focusing on supporting the achievement of Black male students. She is also the author of Racialized Identities: Race and achievement for African-American youth, published by the Stanford University Press in 2012, and co-editor of Mathematics for Equity: A Framework for Successful Practice, published by Teachers College Press in 2014. Her work has examined the organization of learning in cultural practices outside of school, the intersection of identity and learning, and equitable teaching in mathematics. Nasir is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. She is on the board of the National Equity Project, and serves as an advisory board member for the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Division of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also currently the President-Elect of the American Educational Research Association.