Phelton Moss Senior Professorial Lecturer SOE Faculty
- Degrees
- Ph.D. - K-12 Educational Leadership and Supervision, The University of Mississippi
M.Ed- Educational Leadership and Supervision, Arkansas State University
BA- Public Policy and English, The University of Mississippi - Bio
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Dr. Phelton Cortez Moss is Acting Director of the Education Policy & Leadership Masters Program, a Senior Professorial Lecturer of Education Policy & Leadership, and an Inclusive Pedagogy Fellow in the Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning at American University. Additionally, he is a Fellow in the Center for Education Innovation & Research at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Fellow( NAACP). He also currently serves as the Executive Pastor at All Nations Worship Assembly of Washington, D.C.
He has also served as a Senior Policy Adviser to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (FL-24) who served as Chair of the Congressional Higher Education and Workforce Investment Subcommittee. He was also the former congressional liaison to the US Commission on the Social Status of Black Men & Boys. Prior he served as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Tougaloo College and Senior Leader at the Mississippi Department of Education.
He has served as a Policy Fellow for Education Leaders of Color and provided strategic and policy advice across a range of national education issues for members, including early childhood, K-12, postsecondary, higher education, career, and technical education, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), statewide literacy policies, teacher diversity, and workforce development. Notbaly, he led the filing of the historic American Teacher Act to establish a federal grant program to incentivize states to raise teacher salaries. In addition, His research focus is focused on building school and district leaders capacity to diversify the educator workforce and improve efforts to increase teacher recruitment and retention. Lastly, he has worked extensively to ensure state’s have the infrastructure to support strong literacy outcomes for all children.
He has over ten years of experience working in education and education policy from English teacher, policy maker, and principal. As the youngest serving principal in MS, his work in moving an underperforming middle school from an F to C in two years led him to become the Bureau Director of Educator Effectiveness and Talent Acquisition at the Mississippi Department of Education working on K-12 education policy issues including teacher diversity, teacher/leader evaluations, teacher recruitment and retention, educator licensure, and issues of inequity in the distribution of effective teachers. Under Dr. Moss’ leadership, his school doubled math and literacy proficiency for students in those two years.
Most notably, he led the design and launch of the nation’s first state-run teacher residency program with a $4.5M Kellogg Foundation Grant to address the state’s teacher shortage and increase the diversity of the educator workforce in Mississippi. While serving at the Mississippi Department of Education, he completed the year-long national School Systems Leaders Fellowship along with twenty senior education leaders from across the country and received training to become a school systems leader.
As an anti-racist scholar in education policy and leadership focused on building racially just schools, his scholarship has been published widely in venues to include Equity & Excellence Journal, The Education Planning Journal,
Diverse in Education, Inside Higher Education, and Education Week to include a few.
Phelton began his career in education as a high school English teacher in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he was Teacher of the Year for two consecutive years, and corps member of Teach for America. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from the University of Mississippi and a BA in Public Policy Leadership and English from the University of Mississippi. He holds a certificate in Education Finance from Georgetown University. Phelton is a member of The Reading League National Board of Directors and the He Is Me Institute National Board of Directors. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Phelton is also the founder of ALL Means ALL Consulting.
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Teaching
Spring 2024
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EDU-686 Proseminar Educ Pol/Leadership
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EDU-686 Proseminar Educ Pol/Leadership
Summer 2024
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EDU-705 Strategic Resource Mgmt in Edu
Fall 2024
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EDU-634 Education and Public Policy
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EDU-634 Education and Public Policy