Dr. Tangela Blakely Reavis
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership
Professional Overview
Dr. Tangela Blakely Reavis is Co-Director of the Ed.D. in Educational Leadership for Equity & Social Change. She is a scholar-practitioner with nearly two decades of experience in higher-education student affairs, nonprofit leadership, and collaborative educational research.
Her research primarily examines Black students’ pathways into, through, and beyond postsecondary education, focusing on their college-going experiences and trajectories across the intersections of K–12 schooling and higher education.
She also studies how educational organizations structure opportunity. Her work investigates the organizational routines, leadership practices, and the role of policy within schools and colleges, and how these dynamics shape students’ educational pathways, experiences, and access to postsecondary opportunity. In examining institutions, her work seeks to identify the approaches that advance equity and disrupt systems that reproduce inequitable outcomes.
Drawing on critical and asset-based frameworks such as the theory of racialized organizations and community cultural wealth, her projects have examined students’ college-going pathways, including a Spencer Foundation–funded study investigating how the global pandemic reshaped California public schools and postsecondary opportunities for Black students. Additionally, her work also examines the lived experiences and educational trajectories of Black women through the Black Women’s Alumnae Project, a critical oral history study exploring Black women’s college experiences.
Her scholarship has appeared in American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Journal of Higher Education, Urban Education (in press), and Journal of Student Financial Aid, as well as policy outlets such as Brookings and the Education Insights Center (EdInsights).
Dr. Reavis earned her Master’s and Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (with a concentration in Higher Education). A first-generation college graduate and proud HBCU alumna, she received a Bachelor of Arts from Spelman College.