Geoffrey D. Borman

Geoffrey D. Borman is an American education researcher, quantitative methodologist and policy analyst. He is currently the Alice Wiley Snell Endowed Professor at Arizona State University, and co-editor-in-chief of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. His research focuses on educational inequality, federal education policy, randomized field experiments, literacy interventions, social-psychological interventions, and evidence-based education policy.

Early life and Education Borman received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1988. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997 through the Department of Education’s Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistical Analysis (MESA) program.

Research Borman's main research interests revolve around social stratification and the ways in which educational policies and practices can help address and overcome inequality. His methodological work has emphasized meta-analysis, quasi-experimental and experimental research designs, and multilevel modelling. As one of the field’s earliest school-level cluster-randomized trials, the study was recognized by U.S. Department of Education leadership as a “sophisticated study that uses everything the evaluation field has come to recognize as high-quality,” while the same article credited it with helping establish “a new generation of large-scale experiments that use randomized research designs to give educators and policymakers clearer answers on what works in schools”.

Borman's scholarship has further contributed to understanding how federal education programs have reduced persistent achievement gaps in American society. His 2001 book, Title I: Compensatory Education at the Crossroads (Borman, Stringfield, & Slavin, 2001), discussed the history, student achievement effects, and future of the federal government's largest investment in elementary and secondary education: Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (most recently reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act). His article, “Title I and student achievement: A meta-analysis of federal evaluation results," was an influential early synthesis of federal evaluation evidence that documented modest positive effects on student achievement and helped reframe debates over the effectiveness of federal investments in education for economically disadvantaged students.

His later reanalysis of Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity data challenged the longstanding interpretation that schools contribute little to student outcomes, showing instead that school contexts and between-school differences can play a meaningful role in shaping educational inequality.

Finally, other recent research on social-psychological interventions, including values affirmation, adversity reappraisal, and identity-based belonging interventions, demonstrated that brief, theoretically precise interventions can be deployed at scale to improve students’ academic achievement, behavior, and well-being, while reducing persistent racial and ethnic inequities, including narrowing national achievement gaps and the Black–White suspension gap.

Awards and honors Borman has been the recipient of a number of national awards, including a 2002 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, the 2004 Raymond Catell Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association, the 2004 AERA Review of Research Award, the 2008 AERA Palmer O. Johnson Award. He has been selected by Education Week as one of the top 200 scholars for influencing U.S. education practice and policy. In 2009, his contributions to the field of education research were recognized by his nomination and selection as a Fellow of the AERA. In 2015, he was awarded the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2020, the Foundation Professorship from Arizona State University, and in 2021, the Alice Wiley Snell Endowed Professorship.

Selected bibliography

Books

Borman, G. D., & Boulay, M. (Eds.). (2004). Summer learning: Research, policies, and programs. Erlbaum. Borman, G. D., Stringfield, S. C., & Slavin, R. E. (Eds.). (2001). Title I: Compensatory education at the crossroads. Erlbaum

Articles

Borman, G. D., & Yang, H. (2026). "Cumulative access to print books improves literacy achievement: Evidence from a five-year randomized trial in high-poverty schools." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123, e2521416123. Borman, G. D., Pyne, J., Rozek, C. S., & Schmidt, A. J. (2022). "A replicable identity-based intervention reduces the Black-white suspension gap at scale." American Educational Research Journal, 59, 284–314. Borman, G. D., Rozek, C., Pyne, J., & Hanselman, P. (2019). "Reappraising academic and social adversity improves middle-school students’ academic achievement, behavior, and well-being." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116, 16286–16291.

Borman, G. D. (2017). "Advancing values affirmation as a scalable strategy for mitigating identity threats and narrowing national achievement gaps." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 7486–7488.

Borman, G. D., Slavin, R. E., Cheung, A., Chamberlain, A., Madden, N., & Chambers, B. (2007). "Final reading outcomes of the national randomized field trial of Success for All." American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 701–731. Borman, G. D., Hewes, G. M., Overman, L. T., & Brown, S. (2003). "Comprehensive school reform and achievement: A meta-analysis." Review of Educational Research, 73(2), 125–230. Borman, G. D., & D'Agostino, J. V. (1996). "Title I and student achievement: A meta-analysis of federal evaluation results." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 18, 309–326.