Dr. Jerome E. Morris is the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Urban Education (in conjunction with St. Louis Public Schools), and he serves as the Principal Investigator and Director of the Center for Communally-Bonded Research, also in St. Louis. His interdisciplinary and empirically-based scholarship examines the institutional structure and culture in schools, provides innovative conceptual frameworks to study marginalized communities, and cultivates meaningful partnerships with communities and schools. The nexus of race, social class, and the geography of educational opportunity represents a major theme of his scholarship. Before joining the faculty of UMSL in 2015, Morris was a Full Professor in the College of Education and a Research Fellow at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Behavioral Research.
In 2025, Morris was elected President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 2026-2027, becoming the first faculty member in the University of Missouri System to be elected to the position of president. He is also a former Vice-President of AERA. AERA is the largest educational research in the world with more than 25,000 members from 96 countries. A transdisciplinary scholar, Morris has been at the forefront of highlighting the centrality of the U.S. South in African-Americans’ experiences, examining public school desegregation, and rebuilding viable urban communities and schools. He was awarded the prestigious Lyle M. Spencer Research Award from the Spencer Foundation to investigate the development of his theory of Communally-bonded Schooling.
An AERA Fellow and a University of Missouri System Presidential Engagement Fellow, Morris serves as a leader at the local, university, state, and national levels. Morris is a co-founder of Education for Liberation--a national coalition of teachers, community activists, researchers, youth, and parents. He partners with St. Louis-based community organizations such as Good Journey Development Foundation and Black Girls Do STEM, and servers on the advisory board of Sumner High School, the oldest Black High School west of the Mississippi River.
Morris is the author of the groundbreaking book, Central City’s Joy and Pain: Solidarity, Survival, and Soul in a Birmingham Housing Project (University of Georgia Press) and Troubling the Waters: Fulfilling the Promise of Quality Public Schooling for Black Children (Teachers College Press). An award-winning researcher, Morris has published extensively in leading research journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, Review of Research in Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Educational Policy, Urban Education, and Kappan.
Program Involvement
- PhD - Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Published Research Areas
- Achievement
- Adolescence
- Black Education
- Community-Based Education
- Critical Race Theory
- Desegregation
- Educational Policy
- Educational Reform
- Equity
- Ethnography
- Identity
- Minorities
- Poverty
- Qualitative Research
- Race
- Research Methodology
- Social Context
