Date March 23, 2026

Turning rights into reality: Examining barriers to voting and education

By Pete Bilderback

The Watson School's Realizing Rights Lab, led by John Hazen White Professor of Public Policy, Susan Moffitt, brings together faculty, Ph.D., MPA and undergraduate students from across a variety of academic disciplines to research barriers citizens encounter to exercising their rights and what can be done to overcome them.

Rights that are written into law are not always easy for citizens to exercise in practice. The Realizing Rights Lab, one of three policy-focused research labs at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs, was established to address the challenges people face when they attempt to exercise their legal rights, particularly in education and voting.

As lab leader Susan Moffitt explains, “Our fundamental motivation is to investigate what it takes for formal rights that are written into law to become lived experiences, particularly in the United States.”

“For example, we have voting rights and disability rights that exist on the books,” said Moffitt, “but there is a lot of variation in the degree to which people in the U.S. are able to exercise those rights in practice.”

The lab brings together faculty with MPA, Ph.D. and undergraduate students to enhance the link between teaching, research and public outreach. It is anchored by Moffitt and two postdoctoral research associates, Cameron Arnzen and Lindsey Kaler. Other researchers include three current Watson MPA students — Jeanette Chang, Olivia Hayes and Emily Walshin — as well as three Brown MPA alumni — David Benoit, Morgan Reilly and Hannah Rosenstein — and five Brown undergraduate students.

“Our goal is to create usable knowledge not only for social science research, but also for community partners,” said Moffitt. Over the past two years, researchers at the lab have published nine papers, ranging in topic from disability rights in schools to the effects of partisanship in Rhode Island school board elections.

Student training is also a crucial function of the lab, and each year it offers a junior seminar in International and Public Affairs (IAPA). In addition to their pedagogical value, the seminars serve as a pipeline into the lab, with motivated students invited to conduct research there.

One such student is Brown senior Cassandra Coleman, who joined the lab after taking the seminar, Turning Rights Into Realities.

Coleman’s research project focused on police accountability in New York City, exploring how administrative hurdles shape civilians’ decisions to file complaints about police misconduct. In class, Coleman learned to employ sophisticated qualitative research methods to address the issue. “Using data from the New York Civil Liberties Union’s CCRB Misconduct Complaint Database, I analyzed patterns in complaints filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board before and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests,” she said.

Her research for the project sparked her curiosity enough that she joined the lab as a researcher. “Writing the research paper started me thinking about how administrative burdens theory could be applied in higher-level policy-oriented research,” said Coleman. In the lab, Coleman has applied the qualitative fieldwork methods she learned in the seminar to new problems.

This is the model Moffitt envisioned when she founded the lab. “The lab actively trains students through applied research opportunities for undergraduate, MPA and Ph.D. students,” said Moffitt, “Students learn how to do research working for the lab, but they can also carry the skills they develop forward to their own work.”

Coleman intends to do exactly that. “For me, my work with the Realizing Rights Lab was a gateway into the promise of civil rights equity research, which I now intend to pursue as a career,” she said.

Susan has brought together a really strong team of people with different background experiences and driving motivations for engaging in these different buckets of research. Those individual strengths combine to allow us to have a comprehensive approach to understanding different problems.

Lindsey Kaler Postdoctoral Research Associate in Education Policy

Kaler, a post-doctoral research associate in education policy and former teacher with a Ph.D. in special education, noted that one of the strengths of the lab’s model is that the research is not constrained by traditional academic boundaries. “The work we do is very interdisciplinary,” said Kaler, “Susan has brought together a really strong team of people with different background experiences and driving motivations for engaging in these different buckets of research. Those individual strengths combine to allow us to have a comprehensive approach to understanding different problems.”

Kaler’s experience as a special education teacher convinced her that she could make a bigger difference in students’ lives by working to solve some of the systemic problems she encountered in her job.

“I was teaching at the high school level,” said Kaler, “And some of my students didn't even understand what special education was and why they were receiving additional support. And I saw families struggling to understand how to utilize the support services they were entitled to as well.”

Kaler said she decided to study the broader factors impacting the effectiveness of special education. “I wanted to explore how different systems interact from a research lens,” she said, “and find new ways to improve services for students with disabilities.”

“We tend to think of K-12 special education as existing in a box,” said Kaler, “but working in this lab has expanded my ability to think about the lifespan of how individuals engage with schools, and how schools turn individuals into citizens.”

Arnzen is also a post-doctoral research associate in education policy, but came to the lab from a different background. He trained as a political scientist, having earned a Ph.D. in politics and education from Columbia University.

“I was always interested in how people come to participate in politics and engage in democracy,” said Arnzen. “And one of the findings that carried through a lot of my studies was that education really matters. With more education, you always see greater engagement with democratic institutions,” he said. “I kept coming back to the relationship between schools and education and political engagement. So what I study is the relationship between schools and democracy and how schools shape people into citizens.”

Arnzen emphasized the value of education to the overall democratic project. “Schools are an important pillar of democracy,” he said, “They teach us how to engage with democracy. And they teach us how to keep it going.”

Moffitt said Arnzen quickly embedded himself in Rhode Island's unique political milieu. “His suitcase was barely unpacked, and he already had students out at the polls doing exit polling,” she said.

The polling was meant to determine the effects of partisanship in school board elections. Arnzen noted that school board elections in Rhode Island are unusual in that “it is one of the few states that allows school board candidates to run with a partisan affiliation.”

Arnzen’s student team conducted exit polling in Rhode Island, while another team conducted polling in Michigan, where partisan affiliation is prohibited. Based on the survey results, the team produced a report “that demonstrated how overwhelmingly important these partisan cues are for voters when they make voting decisions in Rhode Island,” said Arnzen.

Moffitt noted that a new area of inquiry for the lab is the impact of the Department of Education's dissolution on the educational workforce. “We are interested in investigating how political systems influence who works in education and how they experience that system,” she said. The lab was recently awarded a grant from Brown’s Data Science Center to pursue this line of research.

The key to the lab’s success, according to Moffitt, is collaboration and the ability to work across academic and professional boundaries. “We have colleagues in political science, sociology, data science and education, as well as teachers and other practitioners working with us,” she said. “We draw on a wide range of expertise to help us understand our puzzles. This helps us not only to come up with the right answers, but also helps make our research usable by a wide range of audiences.”

“The lab really tries to have people work within their professional comfort zones, but then talk across those comfort zones to learn and grow in new ways,” said Moffitt. “We bring together not just different concepts, but different methodologies, and we all learn from each other. There are a range of ways in which the lab’s boundary spanning makes it fun and contributes to our work and results,” she said.