Wednesday, Feb. 25, the William and Mary Public Policy Club hosted guest speaker Constance Clark ’08 to discuss her journey as an alumna of the College of William and Mary to her career as a qualitative research manager at the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies.
Clark opened by explaining what drew her to the public policy major.
“I really liked public policy because it was interdisciplinary,” Clark said. “I got to change between classes like government and sociology. You kind of build your own major.”
Clark noted enjoying Isabelle and Jerome E. Hyman Distinguished University Professor of Government Paul Manna’s education policy seminar.
“It really sets you up for a graduate course,” Clark said. “It gave students a lot of different perspectives for the different paths you could take within public policy.”
Clark’s time at the College also sparked her interest in research through her senior thesis.
“It’s a really great experience if you want to learn about research,” Clark said. “It was my introduction to the formal research process. I kept going back to the project for five or six years and presented it at various conferences.”
After graduating from the College with a degree in public policy, Clark received her master’s from the University of Texas at Austin and began working for a nonprofit out of Washington, D.C.
“I got advice to get work experience before applying for Ph.D. programs because a lot of these programs that have a focus on education want people who have experience in educational policy,” she said. “I got very lucky and got paired with a nonprofit that blended policy with research, and I learned a lot and got to publish policy pieces.”
Clark then pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she focused on educational tracking.
“I was always very interested in the disparities between rich and poor and black and white in education,” Clark said. “Students are physically put onto different tracks, and there’s a correlation between that track and the people that are put on that track.”
Clark explained the history of educational tracking.
“Educational tracking began after Brown v. Board,” Clark said. “Once schools were desegregated, they still looked for ways to separate students, so they created these tracks. That’s why it’s called second-generation segregation, and it just stayed that way.”
While completing her Ph.D., Clark also worked at an advocacy organization in North Carolina to push an automatic enrollment policy. This policy would automatically enroll students with higher scores in advanced math courses as a method of reducing race and wealth discrepancies in higher education.
“North Carolina has its tricky history with segregation, desegregation and resegregation,” Clark said. “It’s majority Republican, and for them to be the first state to try de-tracking was interesting. I realized I found my dissertation there as a qualitative study, asking legislatures, community organizers and nonprofits how the policy came about and what they thought about it.”
When asking this question to policymakers, Clark encountered a challenge she didn’t account for: Educational policymakers were uninformed about tracking despite creating legislation surrounding the issue. This experience informed Clark’s dissertation, focusing on the politics of the automatic enrollment policy and its implications for the future of education.
One of the ways educational tracking occurs is through opportunity hoarding, where privileged groups maintain their socioeconomic advantage through acquiring limited resources.
“Some parents spend thousands of dollars to privately test their child to get them into the advanced courses,” Clark said. “There are all of these hidden bars and insider information about how to get what’s best for your child that keeps these structures in place. Detracking is implementing different initiatives to undo that.”
Clark also joined the American Educational Research Association under the Access, Detracking, and Tracking Special Interest Group and is chair of a subgroup focused on member participation.
“I joined when I was a graduate student where I could be appointed for positions, but I couldn’t run for anything,” Clark said. “So the minute I got my Ph.D., I ran for chair.”
As a graduate student, Clark worked on a research project about collective impact initiatives. Thus, when she saw a collective impact initiative looking for an education policy consultant to help with social and economic mobility in Memphis, Tenn., she applied.
“I really wanted that opportunity to work with the community,” Clark said. “It was also very policy-focused. My job was to facilitate the development of public policy but rooted in what the community wanted for education policy. It was very gratifying.”
Clark explained that she chose her current role at the Cornwall Center due to its inclusion of community in research.
“Policies don’t mean much unless they are rooted in the community by the people who the policy will have the most impact on, so those connections are important,” Clark said.
When asked why she chose to study public policy, Clark said the field needs researchers who center community voices in shaping policy decisions.
“It’s just so important,” Clark said. “I think what’s needed in the field is people who can bridge the gap between research, policy and data and the communities it’s impacting. They need to decenter themselves to lift up what a community wants.”
Oliver Goldstein ’28 thought the talk offered a clearer picture for life after studying at the College.
“It’s interesting to hear from someone in the field about how public policy is different than in the classroom,” Goldstein said. “It was also interesting seeing how you can apply a William and Mary public policy major into the real world.”
Sam Isler ’28, the Public Policy Club’s programming chair, appreciated Clark’s emphasis on the multifaceted nature of the field.
“Public policy is one of those things that’s super interdisciplinary,” Isler said. “There’s a lot of different routes like state, local and federal. I think she did a really good job of displaying those different career routes.”
