Bonnie Siegler

I am a 2025 PhD recipient in sociology from Columbia University. In the 2025-26 school year, I will be a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Diversity Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

My research focuses on how organizations produce and attempt to reconcile racial inequality, and it lies at the intersection of sociology of race/ethnicity, organizational sociology, and sociology of education. I am particularly interested in how people think, talk, and make decisions about equity in K-12 education. As such, my research focuses both on organizational approaches to addressing inequality and how stakeholders like parents respond to these efforts. 

My dissertation investigated school district commitments to racial equity in 2020. In other projects, I examine the experiences of DEI workers in K-12 public and private schools. I also study school choice and inequality, with projects focusing on the role of race, language, and class in school choice, as well as the influence of ideas about equity and diversity on parent school preferences. 

My work has been published in Sociology of Education and Socius, as well as the Book Reviews section of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. As I am interested in discourse, beliefs, and attitude/behavior correlations, I use both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, survey experiments, and computational text analysis. 

Before beginning my graduate studies at Columbia, I completed a bachelor's degree in Sociology at Princeton University and a master's degree in teaching at Relay Graduate School of Education, focusing on secondary math education. I am passionate about educational equity, and I have worked in education for more than a decade as a classroom teacher, curriculum writer, mentor, and tutor.

The photos below highlight some of my academic experiences. I am grateful for the community of students, scholars, and practitioners I get to join through this work!