Kelly Goodman

Kelly Goodman is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University where she researches the political economy of American school finance.  After the recent teacher strike wave, voters across the country will decide how to pay for the policies and raises politicians promised in 2020 elections.  Kelly’s dissertation finds the twentieth-century history of these proposals and propositions to tax businesses and the rich in the liberal-labor project to shift public school funding from local communities like Detroit and Los Angeles to state legislatures, and in the conservative reaction to limit government spending.  Centering political contestation and coalitions in a grassroots political history, Kelly follows organized teachers, businesses, and farmers who pursued fiscal strategies in courts and legislatures and through ballot initiatives and constitutional conventions. 

 

Before graduate school, Kelly worked as an education data analyst in Detroit and received a B.A. in History, Economics, and Political Science from the University of Michigan.  At Yale, Kelly has taught economic, diplomatic, environmental, and lesbian and gay history.  Other interests include popular economic ideas, political economy as a historical discipline, teacher unionism, industrial design, and classical pilates.

 

Her research has been supported by grants from the American Federation of Teachers and the Walter P. Reuther Library, the Hagley and Bentley Libraries, and the Hoover and Rockefeller Archives, in addition to Harvard’s Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Travel Fellowship and Yale’s John Morton Blum Fellowship.  During the 2020-2021 academic year, Kelly will be in residence at the Hagley Library in Wilmington, DE as the Jefferson Scholars Foundation’s Louis Galambos National Fellow in Business and Politics.