Phillip Caldwell, II, Ph.D.

As Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Caldwell has assembled diverse expertise and thought partners in the areas of methodological design, quantitative data collection and analysis, qualitative data and analysis, policy analysis, critical theory, school finance, and resource allocation, and economics of public education. The team below represents the core partners in this work. Dr. Caldwell is an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership and Counseling and PI for the InEFE research project, supported by the John W. Porter Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Michael G. Morris Endowed Chair for Outstanding Faculty Members within the College of Education at Eastern Michigan University. He earned a B.S. in mathematics education from Florida A&M University, and an M.E in educational administration, emphasizing educational leadership, policy, and analysis from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a Ph.D. with an emphasis in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison).

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At UW-Madison, he worked with some of the country's most dedicated and accomplished educational scholars during his doctoral studies in the top-ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction, including Drs. Carl Grant, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Beth Graue, Mitch Nathan, and William Tate (Washington University). These are all colleagues with whom Dr. Caldwell regularly consults in seeking ways to improve educational achievement through programs and policies to promote educational equity.

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As a part of his ongoing training as an interdisciplinary applied research methodologist seeking to specialize in mixed methods research, he participated in the 16th Annual Qualitative Research Summer Intensive courses: (i) Mixed Methods Research: Foundations for Design, Execution, and Dissemination (Instructor: Cheryl Poth), (ii) Framing and Maintaining a Research Agenda (Instructor: Fred Bonner), and (iii) Qualitative Research for Applied Practice (Instructor: Sally Thorne). His research primarily focuses on explaining racism's persistence in Michigan’s public school funding policy and practice. His research and methodological design use an explanatory sequential mixed methods design informed by the following components: transformative paradigms, critical race theory, school funding fairness, critical race mixed methods, and explanatory sequential mixed methods. He leads a robust team of diverse expertise that focuses on Michigan school finance reform equity and justice.