Carol D. Lee is professor emerita (the former Edwina S. Tarry Professor) of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African-American Studies at Northwestern University. Lee, the president of the National Academy of Education, is best known in academia for her five decades of work helping students from minority backgrounds excel in an environment of low expectations, poverty, negative stereotypes, and other barriers. She was among the early scholars to scaffold children’s everyday experiences as a resource for learning in school. Today her sophisticated ideas behind “cultural modeling” are a standard approach in the field.
In 2021, Lee received the McGraw Prize in Education, the 2021 James Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association, the premier acknowledgment of outstanding achievement and success in education research. She is a member of the National Academy of Education in the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a fellow of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.