Assistant Professor of K-12 Educational Administration at Michigan State University
About
Dr. Torres is an assistant professor of K-12 educational administration at Michigan State University. Before joining academia, he was an elementary school teacher in the Bronx and Harlem. As a graduate student, he worked as a teacher educator, consultant for Charter Management Organizations, and volunteered as a board chair and trustee of a standalone charter school in the Bronx.
Chris' scholarship focuses on how school choice reforms, particularly charter schools, affect practitioners and educational practice. Currently, his work includes studies on charter school teacher and leader turnover and mobility, sources of learning and support for charter leaders, hiring processes in charter management organizations (CMOs), disciplinary methods in “no- excuses” schools, and portfolio management model (PMM) governance reforms in New Orleans, Denver and Los Angeles.
Current Work:
Current research looks at how teachers perceive the school context and working conditions at "No Excuses" and CMO charter schools, and how these experiences inform their decisions to teach at, stay in, and leave their classroom teaching positions. In particular, this work examines how school leaders influence teacher commitment and turnover in light of the organizational practices, priorities, and values of No Excuses charter school models.
Dr. Torres' research occasionally integrates quantitative methods but primarily employs qualitative methods to understand the complexity behind teacher mobility patterns and to provide insight on how and why teachers make their career decisions. Dr. Torres is also interested in how principals mediate inter-personal relationships and relational trust between school stakeholders, the differences between different charter school types, and how these differences relate to school and teacher effectiveness, teacher education and new forms of teacher development, urban principal turnover and career decisions, and issues related to teacher autonomy and the professionalization of teaching.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Urban education; public policy
