Michelle D. Young, Ph.D.
Dean and Professor, School of Education
Michelle D. Young, Ph.D., assumed the role of dean of LMU School of Education and professor of educational leadership and policy in July 2020. She joined LMU from the University of Virginia, where she was professor of educational leadership and policy; chair of the department of education leadership, foundations and policy; and longtime executive director of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), an international consortium of more than 100 research institutions with master’s and doctoral level programs in educational leadership and administration.
In her first year as dean of LMU School of Education, she was named a 2020 Impact Academy Fellow by Deans for Impact; elected as a board member on the executive committee for Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions (CADREI); tapped for a leading executive committee of the American Educational Research Association (AERA); named to the Dean’s Council for the Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED); and appointed chair of the executive committee for the Education Deans and Directors Council of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU).
She is co-founder and co-director of the INSPIRE Leadership Collaborative, which provides resources to support improvement of leadership preparation, professional learning, and practice. She serves on a number of national policy and academic boards, including the AERA SIG Executive Board, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) Specialized Professional Associations (SPA) Executive Committee, and top tier journal editorial boards including the Educational Administration Quarterly, the American Educational Research Journal and Leadership and Policy in Schools.
Young’s scholarship focuses on how university programs, educational policies and school leaders can support equitable, high-quality experiences for all people who learn and work in schools. She has earned a reputation as an innovative, civic-minded, ethical scholar and leader with a strong commitment to diversity and social justice. During her 19-year tenure as executive director of UCEA, she worked with universities, practitioners, and state and national leaders to improve the preparation and practice of school and school system leaders and to develop a dynamic base of knowledge on excellence in educational leadership; provided leadership for the development of the Professional Standards for Educational Leadership and the National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) standards, which guide the development and accreditation review of educational leadership preparation programs; and led state-wide and institutional reviews of educational leadership development programs. She was granted Emeritus status by UCEA upon her retirement from the organization in 2019.
Equity, improvement and capacity development have been central to Young's work as a researcher and organizational leader. From efforts to diversify the education leadership professoriate and the school leadership pipeline (e.g., mentoring programs, policy initiatives, research projects), to developing a diverse board of directors for UCEA, she searched for and found new opportunities for impact and growth. As UCEA’s executive director, she led the development of the Jackson Scholars Network, a program inspired by the leadership and mentoring of Professor Barbara L. Jackson, which provides doctoral students of color with a system of mentoring and support. The Jackson Scholars program fundamentally changed the diversity of UCEA membership, influenced the priorities and decisions of UCEA as an organization, and has significantly expanded the number of faculty of color in colleges of education and enhanced the ability of universities to recruit people of color into K-12 leadership programs
Young has co-edited or co-authored nine books and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, Redesigning Educational Leadership Preparation for Equity: Strategies for Innovation and Improvement, was published in September 2021. She has edited two editions of the “Handbook of Research on the Education of School Leaders,” and is currently editing the “Handbook of Critical Research Methods in Education.”
She has received multiple awards for her writing and other projects, including the William J. Davis Award for most outstanding article; Emerald Literati Awards for Excellence; and the prestigious Edwin M. Bridges Award for her contributions to research on preparing educational leaders. In 2020 she received the Jay D. Scribner Mentoring Award from UCEA.
Young received her PhD in Educational Policy, Planning and Leadership in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin, her Masters of Education in Special Education with an emphasis on Learning Disabilities and Second Language Learners in 1993 from the University of Texas at Austin, and her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Political Science from Southwestern University in 1989.
Young’s work is available through ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Orchid. You can also follow her on Twitter @MDYoungLEAD and on LinkedIn at Michelle Young.