Rucker Johnson

Rucker Johnson
Rucker Johnson
Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy,
University of California, Berkeley

Rucker Johnson is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As a labor economist who specializes in the economics of education, Johnson considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances, and he seeks to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and remedies of inequality in this country.

Johnson was inducted as the Sir Arthur Lewis Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Education. He received the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and mainstream media outlets, and he has been invited to give policy briefings at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Johnson is author of Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

updated 2022

Publications by Rucker Johnson
California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), signed into law in 2013, represents a substantial investment in school districts serving disadvantaged students and a modest relaxation of restrictions on district expenditures. The policy came at a…