Say Hello! @ AERA San Antonio #AERA17


AERA starts today! If you are interested in education, attending the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference each year is a must!

The conference begins April 27 and goes until May 1. What is AERA? From the website:



AERA is international in scope.  Nearly 5% of members, representing over 85 countries, reside outside of the United States.  Over 28% of AERA members are students–approximately 6,500 graduate students and 600 undergraduate students. Over 74% of AERA members report that education is their primary discipline. Other disciplines represented by AERA members include psychology, statistics, sociology, history, economics, philosophy, anthropology, and political science.

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The theme of #AERA17 is Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity. More about this year’s theme from the website:

Contemporary research discussions regarding educational opportunity bear a familiar ring to those of past decades. They affirm the importance of equal opportunity while highlighting the significance of empirically rigorous research for improving opportunity and access. As a result, they have reignited research and policy debates, dating back more than 60 years (Clark and Clark, 1947, and the Coleman Report, 1966), about segregation and civil rights in the U.S. There is little dispute that considerable change has occurred in legal and institutional mandates as well as social practices that served as barriers to equal opportunity. However, a series of recent research articles, book volumes, and national initiatives have re-examined this change by focusing on the tensions between opportunity and outcomes in relation to several factors, among them, educational attainment, academic achievement, and college enrollment and retention. They raise questions about the meanings and uses of the concept, equal educational opportunity; the social barriers that contribute to inequality; and approaches to increasing educational attainment and achievement for all children.

We are left asking: Are we better positioned today to improve educational opportunities than we were in the past? What are the pathways to achieving equal educational opportunity? How do we transform the power of knowledge and scholarly discourses into public will, engaging practice, and responsive policy? These questions of knowledge and action to achieve equal educational opportunity will be the focus of the 2017 Annual Meeting.

The theme of the Annual Meeting is framed around historical and contemporary discussions about unequal educational opportunity, as they relate to four critical dimensions. The first focuses on the meanings and interpretations of educational opportunity, access, and equity for the purposes of understanding and addressing perennial issues such as school quality and recently intensified problems such as violence in schools. The second poses questions about whether the problems associated with unequal opportunity and the methods used to study them are conceptualized to capture the diversity and complexity of circumstances that countless children, families, and communities (e.g., poor and underserved) face. The third reinforces the need for interdisciplinary research and intersections between education research and other fields invested in eradicating social disparities that lead to marginalization and poor school outcomes. The fourth underscores possibilities for linking educational, social, and public policies that can respond to both longstanding educational issues, such as teaching and student engagement, while attending to increasingly visible problems such as homelessness, trauma, and incarceration that affect students’ ability to thrive.


We invite AERA members to deliberate the expanse of issues associated with equal educational opportunity and contribute submissions that consider the following groups of questions:

  • What counts as educational opportunity, for whom has it improved over the past 60 years, for whom has it not improved, and with what sustainability and potential for the future?
  • How do we conceptualize educational opportunity, who is studied and who is not, and what are the implications for research, policy, and praxis of such conceptualizations?
  • How do we ensure that our inquiry and research questions are relevant and in what ways is the rigor of our research matched by the rigor of methodological frameworks and approaches, interpretation of results, and application of knowledge?
  • How do we leverage knowledge from research and practice to ensure that the most pressing issues reach the forefront of major policy decisions and action, from longstanding issues of teaching and learning, to persistent problems of racial and economic inequality, to understudied topics such as homelessness and incarceration and their effects?
  • What steps might research help craft across educational, social, and public policies at all levels of government and in philanthropy—and what partnerships are needed—to reimagine equity and reduce the risks faced by students, families, schools, and related institutions?

We approach the 2017 Annual Meeting with a deep sense of enthusiasm and hope in the renewed attention to inequality of educational opportunity and ongoing research. We approach the meeting as well with a heightened sense of urgency about the need for enduring change that eliminates barriers to opportunity, engagement, and success. We encourage submissions that motivate members to answer the call to action and to draw decisively upon the strengths of research, practice, and policy to fulfill the promise.

This year will be a busy year for me again at the AERA conference. Today I’ll be at UTSA for a sponsored event that is open to the public.

You can also find us at the following conference meetings. See you there!

I’ll also attend the Black and Brown reception on Sunday night and the Pachanga on Saturday night. Say hello!




  • Education decisions should be fact based and AERA will contribute to that should. However, the Alamo is a unfortunately symbol of American history because the outcome was to win Texas independence from Mexico governance, a governance that had done away with slavery and was for some motivation for participation in that independence revolt.


  • Dr. Vasquez,
    I have followed your work since 2010 and must applaud you and commend you for having the courage to tackle such hard topics in the most professional way. I pray that your journey forward will continue to be blessed.
    Best regards,
    Juanita James

    Liked by 1 person

  • Julian, congratulate Amy Stuart Wells as the next president of AERA. She is a powerhouse professional and leads a long string of great AERA presidents. You are right..AERA one of the best conferences of the year and glad to see your footprint all over the agenda. Best


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