Ann Marie Cotman, Ph.D.
Education Policy Leadership School Improvement
Ensuring the well-being and safety of students is an absolute prerequisite for achieving effective schools and fostering positive outcomes for students. My conviction lies in the belief that rigorous and innovative research, rooted in the rich body of knowledge in educational leadership, can significantly contribute to creating safe and healthy learning environments.
Research matters
Living equals learning, and that every moment of our lives is an opportunity for growth and development. In every experience I have found that the key to meaningful engagement rests in fully including the diversity of the learning community by creating a student-led environment and employing a strengths-based approach.
Teaching centers the learner
The history of school safety in the U.S. is a history of pinballing from one high profile concern to the next. To create safe schools, we must be more deliberate. Interrogating implicit assumptions about safety and examining how we direct school safety resources.
Choices made on data visualizations guide how users make meaning of the information presented. This research investigates design decisions made on 115 state-level dashboards reporting school safety data. Using pre-determined codes drawn from a framework of visualization rhetoric, dashboard characteristics were described and analyzed. Analysis demonstrates that school safety dashboards vary significantly in types of school safety data included as well as how such data are presented. Most dashboards lack specific interpretative text or narration, meaning the messages and stories communicated by dashboards are influenced largely by choices in data included, how it is visually represented, and the interactivity provided to users. The choices craft divergent stories about school safety for dashboard users—including, but not limited to, those that foreground student behavior as the central threat, those that present school practices as problematic, and those that center community creation—which may shape public discourse around school safety. In concert, rhetorical choices reflect different perspectives on safety, students, and schools.
The Full Story
The school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) describes in shorthand the problematic relationship between some students’ school experiences and their subsequent incarceration. One summer, in response to vocal concerned parents, a suburban school board adopted a zero-tolerance policy for smoking and vaping. Through the combined effects of the zero-tolerance approach, exclusionary punishments, the presence of SROs (school resource officers), racially disproportionate disciplinary practices, and a culturally nonresponsive school setting, 90 students were introduced to the criminal justice system in one school year. This case helps school leaders examine the elements of the STPP and how they work together to damaging effect. The questions and activities will guide readers to develop multiple ways to forestall and/or repair STPP supporting policies and practices.
Safety Through Equity: Rethinking School Safety Practices
(2023)
In the absence of careful consideration, safety resources and efforts have centered on the concerns of those in power and exacerbated inequities in schools.
About Ann Marie Cotman
As a former school teacher and teacher with a Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T) from the College of New Jersey and a Ph.D. in School Improvement from Texas State University, my academic and professional journey has been deeply rooted in the field of education leadership and policy with a decided focus on school safety.
My current project at the University of Texas at Austin investigates the challenge faced by special education leaders across the state as they try to successfully staff their special education programs in the face of state- and nation-wide shortages and a hostile policy environment.