From the classroom to the courtroom
Matthew Kelly describes his earliest memories of school as a positive place where he could thrive, so his decision to pursue a career in education was intuitive. What he couldn’t have predicted, however, was that he would provide a critical voice in the landmark constitutional case that reshaped the conversation around school funding in Pennsylvania.
Each year, the Alumni Excellence in Education Award (AEEA) commemorates the diverse and significant career achievements of GSE alumni. Since its inaugural event in 2015, the award has upheld a rigorous selection process that recognizes alumni across multifaceted educational careers and showcases the breadth of opportunities that a career in education can provide.
One of the four 2024 AEEA honorees was alumnus Matthew Kelly, whose earliest commitment to education began in teaching and deepened during his graduate studies at Stanford. While in pursuit of a master’s degree in history and a PhD in the history of education and educational policy, Kelly’s interest in school funding was piqued. He began exploring broad questions about why some school districts had more resources than others as well as the role that public policy plays in determining who gets what in American public schools.“It’s so important in everything we do and say in education" explains Kelly, "that we are engaging in big questions about what we are doing and why and big questions about how we got here.”
In 2023, Matthew testified as an expert witness in a constitutional challenge to Pennsylvania’s school funding system, William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al. Kelly’s testimony and related reports informed the court’s ruling that the state’s funding system was unconstitutional, a landmark decision at the state level in the provision of equitable education in schools. Although challenging, Kelly credits data as the critical tool for championing efforts toward equity in education.
“One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced professionally is engaging in a space where consequential decisions are being made about school funding and whether or not schools are addressing children of color and low-income families,” Kelly explained. “To clarify how far-reaching educational disparities are, we need to be careful and mindful of the data we use. We spend a lot of time learning about how to use data and what tools to apply to data, and a lot less time asking: Are the data accurate?”
Kelly, now nationally recognized as an expert in K‒12 school funding systems, translated his research data into his first book, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell University Press, 2024). He is currently an assistant professor of the history of education at the University of Washington School of Education and has a second book in progress. Kelly credits his time at Stanford with giving him the tools to make transformational improvements in education. "It’s been the privilege of a lifetime to draw upon the skills I learned at Stanford to provide—in a high-stakes civil rights context, in court—the objective technical expertise they need to make far-reaching and consequential decisions.”
The AEEA program is generously supported by the GSE Education Fund and the Skyline Foundation, whose mission is to fund organizations that address problems at their roots and shift systems toward a more equitable and just future.
