Dr. Muhammad Khalifa is the Robert Beck Endowed Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research examines how urban school leaders enact culturally responsive leadership and anti-oppressive schooling practices.
He has written extensively on minoritized student identities in school, and how schools can become more liberatory spaces for Black, Brown and minoritized youth. In addition to his previous work as an urban school educator and leader in Detroit, he has worked with education ministries and organizations in Africa and Asia and has helped them craft educational goals and reforms.

He is the author of the top-selling and critically acclaimed new book, Culturally Responsive School Leadership (Harvard Education Press). He is also co-editor of three other earlier books: Handbook on Urban Educational Leadership, and Becoming Critical: The Emergence of Social Justice Scholars, and The School to Prison Pipeline. Dr. Khalifa has also recently published in the highest-ranked education journals, including Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, QSE, Urban Review, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education, to name a few.

Dr. Khalifa has helped hundreds of school leaders by developing online modules and the Culturally Responsive School Leadership Academy (crsli.org) and has developed a comprehensive, online “equity audit” tool for use in U.S. school--a researched-based way to reduce achievement and discipline disparities in school (ajusted.org).