Education Policy Reports
The CJR Policy Lab is proud to feature a series of education policy reports developed through the Critical Policy Institute (CPI) at the University of Southern California. These reports reflect CPI’s mission to translate academic research into actionable strategies that advance educational equity and support justice prevention efforts across the P–20 pipeline.
The CPI was co-developed with a collective of Black Ph.D. students from USC’s Rossier School of Education and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Their leadership grounds the institute in a model of student-driven, community-centered policy scholarship. Through an immersive training and research process, CPI participants engaged directly with federal agencies, policy organizations, and advocacy networks to produce public-facing work that informs structural change.
This series of reports addresses key educational equity issues—school funding, chronic absenteeism, and DEI policy—each of which connects directly to the broader ecosystem of criminal justice prevention. The work situates education not only as a right, but as a policy domain that holds transformative potential to interrupt cycles of systemic harm and expand opportunity.
These reports exemplify the CPI’s model of justice-focused policy research—research that is timely, student-led, and oriented toward actionable change. At the CJR Policy Lab, we see this work as a vital contribution to the national conversation on prevention and equity, and a blueprint for using education policy as a tool to disrupt systemic injustice.