Dr. Kendall Deas is an Assistant Professor of Education Policy, Law, and Politics with the Department of African American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina.

He is a Faculty Affiliate with the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Rural Education and Development. Dr. Deas is nationally recognized for his research and teaching in education policy and civic engagement and advocating for greater equity, access, and excellence in South Carolina’s public schools as a co-founder and Director of the Quality Education Project. The Quality Education Project (QEP) is a non-profit community-based research organization that provides critical information to policymakers, leaders in PK-12 education, teachers, parents and others concerning what are some existing best practices nationally that can improve public education.

Dr. Deas has an impressive academic background with degrees earned from some of the nation’s leading universities. He received his Ph.D in education policy and law from the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education. He holds a BSFS degree in international politics and a Certificate in Western European Studies from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, a M.A. degree in globalization studies from Dartmouth College’s Frank J. Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, a M.A. degree in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, and a MSPP degree in public policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy. Dr. Deas was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He was a one-year Visiting Student at Mansfield College of Oxford University and is an Emerging Diversity Scholar and New Leadership Academy Fellow in higher education leadership with the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity.

Dr. Deas has received numerous awards for his work including the University of South Carolina’s 2023 MLK Jr. Social Justice Award for his research on improving public education and advocacy for greater investment in traditional public education in South Carolina, and as a co-founder and Director of the Quality Education Project. While on faculty and holding an administrative leadership position in diversity as Director of Diversity Education, Training, and Grant Initiatives at the College of Charleston, he was honored during the 2016 ExCEL Awards where he received the Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award for both the School of Education, Health, and Human Performance and the Honors College making history at the College as the first faculty member to ever win multiple awards for faculty excellence for an awards period.   A Fulbright Scholar to Finland, his research interests are focused upon the politics of PK-12 education reform, eradicating the achievement gap, examining the issue of education reform as it concerns the use of culturally relevant teaching pedagogies, and exploring the transformational capacities of education shaped by policies designed to achieve greater equity and social justice for least advantaged populations. Given his success in the field of education policy as an early career scholar, he is a 2025 Scholars Strategy Network Policy Fellow, one of 15 scholars selected nationally for the 2025 national cohort of the Scholars Strategy Network’s Education Scholar’s Training Program. Scholars are nominated and selected based upon academic excellence and the potential societal impact of their research in education policy.

Dr. Deas was on the Board of Directors and lead grant writer for the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Charleston Freedom School in Charleston, SC that uses culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogy to offer summer programs to curb summer learning loss and enhance literacy. He is a member of the Faculty Editorial Board for the peer-reviewed academic journal Education Law & Policy Review and Editor-in-Chief for the tier one peer-reviewed academic journal, Journal of Educational Foundations (JEF).