Rucker C. Johnson is an American economist currently serving as Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
[3] He won the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship[4] and also the 2022 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education (a $100,000 prize) for his 2019 book “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works,” written with Alexander Nazaryan.
[6][7][8] He attended Morehouse College, graduating in 1995, and completed his MA and PhD degrees in economics at the University of Michigan in 2002.
[2] In his book, "Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works," he argues that integration improved the academic and life outcomes of black students--especially because it affected the same students who benefitted from the early years of the Head Start Program--but meaningful school integration in the United States lasted for only 10-15 years in the 1970s and 1980s.
[9] In work with Kirabo Jackson and Claudia Persico, he found that court-ordered increases in school resources affected school graduation rates, college-completion rates, and adult earnings for the affected children.