The National Education Finance Academy is a professional organization home to scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers who share an interest in studying education finance. The mission of the National Education Finance Academy is to promote scholarly inquiry, to advance knowledge, and to inform policy and practice in the field of education finance. Goldstream Group’s Research Director, Dr. Delia Allen has served on the NEFA Board of Trustees from 2022 to 2023. This year, she was nominated and elected as Vice President.
We sat down with Dr. Allen to learn about her recent election as Vice President of the National Education Finance Academy.
Dr. Allen’s professional journey to this appointment started years prior to joining the Goldstream Group. Before her leadership role at Goldstream Group, she served as a high school mathematics teacher, a visiting professor in Clemson’s Department of Educational and Organizational Leadership Development, and a Research Associate and Consultant at Furman University’s Riley Institute. Dr. Allen holds a Master of Arts in Teaching in secondary mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Policy with certification in Education Law and Policy – in addition to her two engineering degrees.
When asked specifically about how the process of joining NEFA began, she stated, “I was in graduate school and my dissertation chair suggested that I submit a paper to the National Education Finance Academy annual conference – it was accepted” The paper was titled, “The Legal Realism of School Funding Litigation in Abbeville v. South Carolina: What is the value of violation?” That was Dr. Allen’s introduction to the organization and from 2018 on, she maintained her membership.
During Delia’s time with the organization, she was the inaugural recipient of the William and Ann Fowler Education Finance Policy Research Fellow award in 2018, which “supports early-career researchers whose research focuses on solving applied education finance and budgeting problems that possess a direct application to improving current practice; and promotes new scholars’ entry and participation into the National Education Finance Academy academic and institutional research community.” In 2022, she was named by National Education Finance Academy as a “Distinguished Fellow of Research and Practice” in recognition of her research and influence in the field of education finance. Now in her new role as Vice President, Dr. Allen hopes to “strengthen the engagement of, and bridge the communication gap between, education finance scholars, K-12 district level leadership and policymakers.”
