Tom J. Shields

Dr. Tom Shields researches and teaches at the intersection of K-12 education and leadership studies. His popular elective, Education and Equity, focuses on housing-school relationships and segregation. He teaches the Jepson School core courses Historical Foundations of Leadership and Justice and Civil Society. Previously, he taught courses in the University’s undergraduate and graduate education programs, including Foundations of Educational Leadership, Contexts of Educational Politics and Policy, and Education and Public Policy. 

Shields is an expert on historic and current segregation in K-12 education and housing and its impact on child opportunity. He co-authored a series of reports titled Can We Live & Learn Together and the companion website Learn & Live, all of which examine the education-housing nexus in metro Richmond. Through the University’s Unpacking the Census initiative, he works on disseminating census data about Greater Richmond. 

He has published articles in School Leadership & Management, Educational Administration Quarterly, Academic Exchange Quarterly, Journal of Black Studies, and Politics and Policy and opinion pieces in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Style Weekly, and Richmond Magazine.  

Shields was the founding chair of the University's Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Program and the founding director of its Center for Leadership in Education. He served as a visiting international scholar at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and taught at the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia. 

Prior to his work in academia, Shields was involved in politics in Virginia. He was one of the first staffers hired by Congressman Bobby Scott, the first African American to be elected to Congress from Virginia since Reconstruction. Shields also ran for the Virginia House of Delegates.