Scott teaches a social action course at San José State University and co-founded with his students the successful effort to raise the minimum wage in San José from $8 to $10 and the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign, an initiative to develop 100,000 prevailing wage jobs for local and displaced workers after Hurricane Katrina. In the 1990s and 2000s, he worked to help students develop solutions to poverty by taking them to live at homeless shelters, the Navajo and Lakota nations, the U.S. Gulf Coast, and Kingston, Jamaica.
Scott is the lead author of the 2021 Silicon Valley Pain Index conducted by the San José State University Human Rights Institute—an annual report focusing on racial discrimination and income inequality in the region. He's also the author of CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action (Routledge, forthcoming January 2022), CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action (Routledge 2018), Ending Extreme Inequality: An Economic Bill of Rights Approach to Eliminate Poverty (Paradigm 2015), Rebuild America: Solving the Economic Crisis through Civic Works (Paradigm 2009) and Social Solutions to Poverty: America's Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on racism, education, and civic engagement.
Scott holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an MA in Humanities from San Francisco State University.