Benjamin Justice
Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History, Rutgers University
ben.justice@gse.rutgers.edu • LinkedIn
“Over the last thirty years, the United States has seen a massive shift in how public school teachers are trained. Once trusted in the hands of universities, teacher preparation has become a wild West of providers—from high quality to highly suspicious.”
Benjamin Justice is Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. He also an associate member of the History Department at Rutgers—New Brunswick and is a Senior Research Scholar and member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.
Dr. Justice is a member of the Board of Directors of the History of Education Society, a member of the Standing Committee on American History for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and serves as chair of the Editorial Committee at Rutgers University Press as well as editing the book series, New Directions in History of Education.
Dr. Justice is holds a B.A. (history) from Yale, and a M.A. (history) and Ph.D. (Education) from Stanford University. His scholarship is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, appearing in journals in education, history, law, social and political science, and philosophy, as well as in mainstream periodicals, radio, and tv. His book, The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865-1900, provides a social history of the micropolitics of religion in public schools in the country’s most religiously diverse state. In Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School (coauthored with Colin MacLeod), he looks at tensions between public education and democratic ideals from historical and contemporary perspectives. He is also editor of The Founding Fathers, Education, and the Great Contest, which examines educational ideas in the early American Republic, and the methods by which historians uncover them.
Currently Dr. Justice is developing a line of research that examines the ways in which the US criminal justice system creates citizens. This work builds innovative connections between legitimacy theory and curriculum theory, positing that the criminal justice system is, itself, an educational system that bears both a formal and hidden curriculum. The dominant variable in these competing curricula, he argues, is race. Dr. Justice has written several articles on the subject and is currently writing a book with coauthor Tracey Meares that seeks to understand how experiences with police, courts, and pre-trial detention shape civic identity.
Dr. Justice is the winner of numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and service, such as the AESA Critics Choice Book Award, the AERA Outstanding Reviewer Award, A National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the NY State Archives/NY Department of Education/State University of New York Researcher of the Year, and awards in service, teaching, and research from Rutgers University and the Graduate School of Education.
Publications
Books
Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School
Published on 11/1/2016 by University of Chicago Press