John Diamond is Professor of Sociology and Education Policy at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, he was the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Education at Wisconsin – Madison. A sociologist of race and education, he studies the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, examining how educational leadership, policies, and practices operate through school organizations to shape students’ educational opportunities and outcomes. Diamond has published widely in sociology and education journals and is the co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (with Amanda Lewis) and Distributed Leadership in Practice (co-edited with James Spillane). Diamond is currently writing a new book, Defending the Color Line, on race and education.
His current research focuses on race, leadership, and organizational change in urban and suburban schools. He recently received a major grant from the Wallace Foundation to study the development and implementation of equity-centered principal pipelines in several school districts across the United States with colleagues from UW-Madison and other institutions.
An engaged scholar, Diamond is an Advisory Board Member of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology Action Network and a National Planning Team Member of the Urban Research Action Network (URBAN). He is the co-editor of Sociology of Education (with Odis Johnson Jr).
He received his BA in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University.
As co-principal investigator, Diamond co-leads Implementation study B focusing on the development of the equity-centered pipeline programs in each ECPI district form the initial theory of action through program implementation.