Sarah Reckhow
Professor, Political Science
Photo: Summer 2018; Detroit, MI
Sarah Reckhow is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include urban politics, education policy, and nonprofits and philanthropy.
Her most recent book, written with Jeffrey Henig and Rebecca Jacobsen, is Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics. Outside Money received the Dennis Judd Best Book Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her first book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, examines the role of major foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, in urban school reform. Sarah was recently awarded a research grant from the Spencer Foundation (with Matt Nelsen, Andrea Benjamin, Abigail Dym, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, and Jane Lo) to study how local civic education curriculum in Detroit and Chicago can shape students’ interest and engagement with local politics. She has recently published articles in State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Political Behavior, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Urban Affairs Review.
Her teaching emphasizes engaged project-based learning. Students in her Urban Politics classes have updates dozens of Wikipedia biography sites for U.S. mayors through the WikiEdu program. In a newly developed class, Civic Education and Local Democracy, Sarah’s students built local citizen manual websites aimed at providing local politics information for young people in the City of Lansing and City of East Lansing.
Sarah serves on the steering committee for the Michigan State Interdisciplinary Training in Education and Social Science (MITTENSS) Fellowship, a doctoral fellowship program at MSU linking education policy and social science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. In the early 2000s, Sarah taught history and government at Frederick Douglass High School in the Baltimore City Public Schools.
Sarah has two kids and a highly energetic husky, and she is married to fellow political scientist Matt Grossmann. Sarah and Matt are co-owners of Hooked - a bookstore and cafe in Lansing, MI.
