Kenneth Shores, a doctoral candidate in the Administration and Policy Analysis Program at Stanford Graduate School of Education, has received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for 2015.

The $27,500 awards support individuals “whose dissertations show potential for bringing fresh and constructive perspectives to the history, theory, analysis, or practice of formal or informal education anywhere in the world.”

Shores’ research on educational inequality was inspired by five years spent teaching at a Bureau of Indian Education School in Pueblo Pintado, a small Navajo community in northwestern New Mexico. For various reasons, “many of my students felt school was not a necessary step for career advancement,” he explains. “This fact really forced me to consider and articulate what value there is in achievement when it is not directly tied to the labor market.”

In his Stanford dissertation, “Opportunities, costs and benefits: Rethinking the education production function,” Shores argues that academic achievement is important to student welfare even when it is not necessary for earnings, drawing on normative philosophical methods and John Rawls' conception of justice. He then presents a new method for calculating the benefits of academic achievement for students of varying ability levels. While “there is empirical evidence to show that we should be targeting low achievers,” he reports, “we should also recognize that the gains we’ve made in closing the achievement gap are meaningful ones.”

His academic adviser, Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education, calls Shores “an intellectually nimble scholar, equally at home in philosophical discussions of the definition of educational equality and in rigorous statistical analyses of the effects of educational policies.”

Shores, who earned his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Rhode Island in 2003, was one of 30 doctoral students listed as winners of this year's award, chosen out of some 400 applicants. The program, administered by the NAEd in partnership with the Spencer Foundation, seeks to identify the most talented graduate students conducting education-related research in the nation.

Other dissertation fellows from Stanford in the past five years include Eric Taylor and Ilana Umansky in 2014; Elizabeth Buckner, Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Lorien Chambers Schuldt, and Jon Valant in 2013; Julie Cohen in 2012; Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Sara Rutherford-Quach in 2011; and Kendra Bischoff, Maria Perez and David Yeager in 2010.