Jerome Morris, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Urban Education at UMSL, has been voted president-elect of AERA. Morris will join the AERA Council in 2025 as president-elect, and his presidency begins at the conclusion of the association’s 2026 Annual Meeting. He will become the first professor in the University of Missouri System to hold the position of president. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
Jerome E. Morris has been an active participant in the over 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 30 years, and now, after decades of dedicated membership and service, he will have the opportunity to become its leader.
Morris, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Urban Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has been voted president-elect of AERA. He joins the AERA Council in 2025 as president-elect, and his presidency begins at the conclusion of the association’s 2026 Annual Meeting. Morris’s selection also makes history as he becomes the first professor in the University of Missouri System to hold this position.
“To be elected president represents the culmination of my scholarship, my commitment to the organization, my commitment to educational research and my belief in knowledge and scholarship as a vehicle to advance the public good,” Morris said. “It embodies the work that I’ve done over the past three decades.”
Maisha Winn, the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professor at Stanford University, will assume the presidency in April at the close of AERA’s annual conference in Denver. During her year-long term, Morris will serve as president-elect and will ascend to the presidency in 2026.
Previously, the organization named Morris a 2022 AERA Fellow in recognition of his outstanding research and professional contributions to the field of education. He is one of the country’s foremost scholars on the impact of school reforms, as well as the links between race, social class and the geography of educational opportunities in communities in the South.
In 2020, he won the Spencer Foundation’s Lyle Research Award to Transform Education, receiving $1 million in funding to support a multiyear research project on his theory of communally bonded education. Additionally, Morris has written scores of scholarly articles and two books on the topic of urban education.
Those achievements were possible, in part, because of the community and mentorship Morris found in AERA as a graduate student. He was able to connect with fellow graduate students across the nation and find a sense of belonging in academia as well as receive guidance from more senior scholars.
“I see the beauty of AERA as providing that space for graduate students and early career scholars who are trying to navigate the academy and generally navigating their home institution,” Morris said. “It allows you to see that your home institution is not the only place where you can do your work and where your work can be appreciated.”
Over the years, Morris worked diligently to give back to the organization and to serve as a mentor for new generations of scholars. But he hadn’t thought much about being president until several colleagues asked him if he would ever consider it. “It was more of that communal or collective sense of belief in my ability to do it,” he said.
Morris said the next year will give him the opportunity to shadow President Winn and develop specific goals for his eventual term as president. He intends to be adaptable and address what is pertinent to the organization and the broader education community when he takes office.
However, two things will guide his leadership in general. First, Morris wants to highlight the importance of the community itself. As a graduate student, he was able to find community in academia through AERA. Additionally, his career and work have been strengthened by his wife and children, who have often accompanied him to conferences and have subsequently become members of AERA themselves.
“One of the things I realized is that working alongside like-minded academics is essential to development, to creating great people, to doing good scholarship,” Morris said. “It is essential to high-quality education communities. So, that’s No. 1.”
Secondly, Morris plans to take cues from his research, which has focused on historically marginalized groups and how to create opportunities for them by creating supportive education environments. He has always championed high-quality learning experiences for students from those communities.
“One of the things I will say concretely is that my work and my presidency will center those who have been historically on the margins, particularly in terms of social class and race,” he said.
He also hopes that his new role will help shine a light on the cutting-edge educational research being conducted at UMSL and encourage others to get involved with AERA. From personal experience, he knows that, while it can be intimidating at first to enter such large academic and professional spaces, he is certain that UMSL’s students and faculty members can thrive given the opportunity.
“I’m excited to be the president-elect at this pivotal moment in time,” Morris said. “I thank the organization membership for trusting that I could represent them and for electing me in this role.”
