Martha McCarthy

Martha McCarthy is a Presidential Professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, and she specializes in education law and policy and the preparation of school leaders. She’s also a Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at Indiana University (IU), where she chaired the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and was founding director of the Indiana Education Policy Center and the High School Survey of Student Engagement. Early in her career, she was an award-winning inner-city teacher and school administrator, and upon completing her PhD, she won the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the University of Florida’s College of Education.

She has served as President of the Education Law Association (ELA) and the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) and as Vice-President for Division A (Administration) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Among awards, she has received lifetime achievement awards from UCEA (Campbell Award), ELA (McGhehey Award), the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (Living Legend Award), and IU (Sonneborn Award). She also has received research awards from various groups including the American Association of School Administrators, the Indiana Association of School Leaders, the IU Office for Women’s Affairs, Kappa Delta Pi Honorary, and Division A of AERA, and LMU (Rains Research Award). She was inducted into the University of Kentucky Alumni Hall of Fame for the College of Education, named an Alumna of Outstanding Achievement to celebrate the University of Florida’s fiftieth anniversary of admitting female students, and was named an AERA Fellow. In 2013, IU established the Martha McCarthy Institute on Law and Policy that draws a national audience to IU each summer.

Professor McCarthy has written or coauthored more than a dozen books and more than 300 articles or chapters and has made numerous presentations regarding various aspects of students' and teachers' rights, church-state relations, curriculum censorship, equity issues, privatization of education, school reform efforts, student engagement, and characteristics of students and faculty in administrative preparation programs. She has been a legal columnist for several journals and has served on 12 editorial boards for professional journals pertaining to school law, educational leadership, or educational research.