Health Policy Research Seminar: Anjali Adukia, EdD, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy

Topic: "Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks."

Abstract: Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying computational methods–including AI tools–to measure the presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over time. Despite narratives of political polarization, our findings reveal few meaningful differences between public school textbooks from Texas and California. However, religious school textbooks have less female representation, feature lighter-skinned individuals, and portray topics like evolution and religion differently. Over one-third of pages in each collection convey character values, with a higher proportion in religious school textbooks. Important similarities also emerge: all textbook collections rarely include LGBTQIA+ discussion, portray females in more positive but less active or powerful contexts than males, and depict the U.S. founding era and slavery in similar contexts.

Bio: Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director of the MiiE Lab (Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education). In her work, she seeks to understand how children from all backgrounds can have opportunities to realize their potential. Adukia's work draws on large-scale data, often deriving data from previously unused and underused sources, including employing artificial intelligence (AI) methods to expand the tools and data used in social science.

Adukia has received an NSF CAREER Award in economics (2024-2029), the SREE Early Career Award (2023), the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award (2018-2023), the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018), and an Institute of Education Sciences grant (2020-2022).  Her doctoral thesis won best dissertation awards from APPAM and AEFP. Her research has received awards from Google and has been featured in media outlets such as Scientific American, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Education Week, School Library Journal, and NPR.

Adukia is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the Economics of Education and Children and Families groups, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab.  She is on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Journal of Social Computing (IEEE).  She co-organizes the annual AI in Social Sciences conference at The University of Chicago. She completed her doctoral degree at Harvard University, with a focus on the economics of education. She has a masters of education from Harvard University and a bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.