Dr. Mariko Yoshisato Cavey is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Her work focuses broadly on community engagement and scholarship, and supports university-school-community partnerships for equity in education research, policy, and practice.
Additionally, she currently serves as Director of Higher Education Partnerships for the National Partnership for Student Success. This Biden-Harris Administration initiative aims to increase the number of people serving in high-impact P-12 student support roles in communities across the country, to address immediate pandemic recovery needs in education, build the future educator pipeline, and support students’ holistic thriving through evidence-based, locally-determined solutions.
Dr. Yoshisato Cavey’s work is grounded in collaborative and reciprocal relationships between scholars, practitioners, policymakers, youth, and other partners striving to advance educational equity across a variety of topics and settings. Her research-practice partnerships have involved national equity-focused organizations including AVID, City Year, Learning for Justice, The Conscious Kid, and more. Her work has been funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, among others. Dr. Yoshisato Cavey also enjoys collaborating in sharing outcomes of collective work, and has published co-authored articles with researchers, practitioners, and students in Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, and other outlets.
Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty, Dr. Yoshisato Cavey was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, and a Changemaker Faculty Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.S. in Counseling with a Specialization in School Counseling and Pupil Personnel Services Credential from San Diego State University. Her work is also informed by years of professional experience across P-12 and higher education settings. In previous educational leadership roles, she cultivated university-school-community partnerships, facilitated community-engaged learning experiences, designed equity-centered curricula, and advanced college opportunity and student success programming in a breadth of diverse regional and institutional contexts.
- Education Policy Implementation
- Foundations: Policy as a Lever for Change
- Social Change in Local and Global Contexts
- Community-Engaged Learning and Civic Engagement
- Educational Equity and Social Justice
- Postsecondary Pathways and Persistence
- Qualitative Methods and Student/Educator Voice
- Research-Practice Partnerships and Capacity-Building
- Datnow, A., Yoshisato, M., Macdonald, B., Trejos, J., & Kennedy, B. C. (2022). Bridging educational change and social justice: A call to the field. Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221138837
- Pollock, M., De los Angeles Lopez, D., Yoshisato, M., Reece, E., Kendall, R., & Kennedy, B. C. (2022). Next steps towards an inclusive country?: Inviting and amplifying youth voices. Journal for Multicultural Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/JME-02-2022-0036
- Pollock, M., & Yoshisato, M. (2022). #USvsHate: The power and pitfalls of using an “anti-hate” onramp for K12 antiracism today. Race Ethnicity and Education, 25(4), 461-486. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2022.2033195
- Pollock, M. & Yoshisato, M. (2021). What’s going on: “Partisan” worries, and desires to discuss Trump era events in school. Teachers College Record, 123(10), 59-90. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681211058946
Dr. Yoshisato Cavey serves as Director of Higher Education Partnerships for the National Partnership for Student Success, a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. She provides the capacity-building guidance and cross-sector collaboration needed to help colleges and universities partner with districts and nonprofits to support P-12 students in their regions. She also facilitates a national coalition of institutions working to answer the U.S. Department of Education’s call for colleges and universities to recruit, train, place, and engage more students in P-12 support roles, through Federal Work-Study employment and other pathways to community service.
Dr. Yoshisato Cavey is also a District Facilitator with the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks, at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. For this research-practice partnership, she helps statewide networks of rural districts build capacity to implement, analyze, and refine postsecondary readiness interventions, through continuous improvement efforts that support the unique needs of rural schools and communities.