IAJS Faculty Grants

Nearly forty years ago, the Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Program was created to expand educational opportunity for children growing up in some of the Bay Area’s most underserved communities. It represented a bold and hopeful commitment: that crossing district boundaries could help break cycles of segregation, open doors to high-quality educational environments, and build stronger, more connected communities across the Peninsula. Much has changed since the program’s founding. The Bay Area’s demographics have shifted dramatically. Patterns of segregation now look different than they did a generation ago. Families participating in the program today are more diverse, and the educational landscape they navigate is more complex. Yet despite these changes—and despite the program’s national significance as one of the few long-standing voluntary desegregation efforts in the country—the Tinsley Program has never been comprehensively re-evaluated in light of current conditions. This study addresses that gap to provide the first modern, data-driven assessment of the Tinsley Program’s impact on students’ educational experiences, sense of belonging, and long-term pathways into adulthood. 

Advancing immigration justice in the United States requires shifting public attitudes and policy preferences. Video ads are one of the more promising routes to achieving these shifts because of their scalability, yet little research has rigorously tested which immigration narratives are most persuasive, or whether those effects hold up in real-world media environments. With support from the IAJS Faculty Seed Grant Program, Willer and his collaborators are conducting a field experiment to identify and scale effective immigration-justice video narratives. The project meta-analyzes a large archive of professionally produced immigration-justice video ads and tests the most promising ones via a randomized controlled trial using addressable advertising on streaming television. The study measures effects on prejudice toward immigrants, support for pro-immigrant policies, and beliefs about immigrants' cultural and economic contributions, with attention to the durability of effects over time and generalizability across demographic groups. Findings will be translated into actionable guidance for civil society organizations and immigration-justice advocates working to shift public opinion at scale.