“Rekindling the Spirit of Brown v. Board of Education: A Call to Action”
PANELIST PROFILES
Dr. J. Lawrence Aber, Professor of Population and Family Health
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Dr. J. Lawrence Aber, a nationally recognized expert in child development and social policy, is currently Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. While a member of the psychology department at Barnard College and the Graduate Faculties at Columbia University from 1982 to 1994, he directed the Barnard Center for Toddler Development, co-directed the Columbia University Project on Children and War, and co-founded the Barnard-Columbia Center for Leadership in Urban Public Policy. From 1994 to 2003, Dr. Aber served as Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia, and from 1999 to 2003; he also served as Co-Director of Columbia’s Institute for Child and Family Policy. Dr. Aber continues to consult with community-based programs for children, youth, and families as well as local, state, and federal agencies and UNICEF on program and policy issues ranging from child care and child abuse to youth violence and community development. His basic research interests focus on the social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development of children and youth at risk due to family and neighborhood poverty, exposure to violence, abuse and neglect, and parental psychopathology. Dr. Aber received his Ph.D in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at Yale University in 1982. In January 2004, Dr. Aber will join the Faculty of the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.
Dr. Renato Almanzor, Manager, Community Partnership Development
Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES)
Dr. Almanzor received his Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, his M.S. in counseling from San Diego State University, and his B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Davis. He has been a professor at Alliant International University and the University of San Francisco. He continues to serve on dissertation committees, supervise graduate interns, and teach courses as an adjunct. Dr. Almanzor is currently the Manager for Community Partnership Development at the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES). In this capacity he is responsible for developing and coordinating community engagement strategies throughout Oakland towards the creation of new small schools, the conversion of large comprehensive schools, and the redesign of the school district. Dr. Almanzor serves on the Board of Directors for the Oakland Asian Student Educational Services (OASES) as the Vice President, the School Site Council of his son’s school, and actively supports many Multicultural groups, especially Asian Pacific and Filipino organizations, student groups, and community-based agencies
James Anderson, Professor & Chair
Department of Educational Policy Studies,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
James Anderson is Professor at and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, for which he won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 1990. Professor Anderson’s past research has focused on the history of African American education in the South from 1860-1935, the history of higher education desegregation in southern states, the history of public school desegregation, institutional racism, and the representation of Blacks in secondary school history textbooks. He is currently working on a history of African American public higher education and the development of African American school achievement in the twentieth century. Professor Anderson holds a Ph.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. from Spellman College.
Arthur Benson, Attorney at Law
Arthur Benson & Associates, Kansas City, MO
Arthur Benson was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, graduated from Williams College in 1966 with a degree in Economics and from Northwestern University Law School in 1969 with a J.D. He was a Reginald Heber Smith Community Services Fellow assigned to the legal services office in Kansas City, 1969-1971; Executive Director of the Kansas City office of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, 1971-1972; and has had his own private practice since then. He was lead counsel for the plaintiff schoolchildren in the Kansas City School Desegregation Litigation, Jenkins v. Missouri, from 1979 until unitary status was granted and the case ended on September 30, 2003. His practice includes an array of civil rights and constitutional litigation at the trial and appellate levels, and he has been known to represent plaintiffs suing other lawyers for legal malpractice. He is married and the father of a high school age daughter.
Gary Blasi, Professor of Law
University of California at Los Angeles School of Law
After twenty years of complex litigation on behalf of the poor, during which time he achieved a national reputation for his work on behalf of the homeless, Gary Blasi joined the UCLA faculty. He teaches clinical and public interest lawyering courses, including Clinical Seminar in Public Policy Advocacy. His recent clinical work has focused on the regulation of slum housing and on trying to hold public officials accountable for the educational opportunities provided to California’s children and the decrepit conditions of L.A. schools that a recent seminar of his documented. He has received numerous awards for distinction in the field of public interest law and for providing legal services to the poor. After graduate work during which he was a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Professor Blasi, in 1976, qualified for admission to the California Bar without ever attending law school based upon four years of law office study. He practiced in a community law office in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles before joining the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles in 1978. There, he specialized in housing, redevelopment, and welfare litigation, and became Special Projects Attorney and the Director of the Homeless Litigation Unit, coordinating complex, class action litigation on behalf of homeless individuals and families. Professor Blasi’s research interests and publications include work not only on public interest lawyering and the homeless, but also on the application of psychology and cognitive science to describing and explaining the expertise and practical wisdom that seasoned lawyers bring to problem solving.
Josephine Brown, Adjunct Professor of Law
University of South Carolina School of Law
Josephine Brown is an adjunct professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Professor Brown, an expert in constitutional issues in public education, will teach a course entitled “Race, Education and The Constitution: A Legal History of Brown v. Board,” in spring 2004. Professor Brown is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Following law school, Professor Brown worked as a law clerk to Judge James McMillan, US. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, who handled the famous Charlotte busing case.
Beverly Cross, Associate Professor of Curriculum Theory and Urban Education, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Prior to teaching at the university level, Professor Cross taught public high school and worked at the state education level. She conducts research in the areas of teacher diversity, urban education, multicultural and anti-racist education, and curriculum theory. Her research has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Educational Leadership, International Journal of Educational Reform, and the Urban Review. She frequently presents workshops on integrated curriculum, anti-racist teaching, and curriculum reform for social justice. She is also a member of the board of the Applied Research Center, based in Oakland, California
Nancy Denton, Associate Professor of Demography
Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany
Professor Denton is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the State University of New York at Albany. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.A. in Sociology from Fordham University. Her major research interests are race and residential segregation, and she is the author of numerous articles on the topic. Together with Douglas S. Massey she is the author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, winner of the 1995 American Sociological Association Distinguished Publication Award and the 1994 Otis Dudley Duncan award from the Sociology of Population section of the American Sociological Association. Her current research projects examine segregation and the process of neighborhood change, the relationship between housing values and neighborhood racial composition, and the neighborhood contexts of children by race/ethnicity/immigrant generation. In addition to her research and teaching, she is active in communicating the results of her work to the non-academic world in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and to many fair housing groups.
Henry Der, State Administrator
Emery Unified School District, Emeryville, CA
Appointed by former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, Henry Der has served as the State Administrator of Emery Unified School District since August 1996. From 1996 to 2001, as Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction at the California Department of Education, Mr. Der had administrative responsibilities for the State Superintendent’s state and federal school reform legislative agenda and then for programs serving at-risk and special need students. From 1974 to 1996, Mr. Der served as the executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), a San Francisco-based voluntary membership-supported civil rights organization with a focus on education, employment and immigrant rights. Appointed by the Assembly Speaker, Mr. Der served two six-year terms on the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) and as commission chairperson for three years, 1993 to 1995.
Deborah Escobedo, Staff Attorney
Multicultural Education, Training & Advocacy (META)
Deborah Escobedo received her B.A. in political theory from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1976) and her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law (1979). Since August, 1989, Ms. Escobedo has been a staff attorney with Multicultural Education, Training & Advocacy (META), Inc., a national legal advocacy organization which specializes in education issues affecting the rights of low-income, minority and immigrant students. Ms. Escobedo is co-lead counsel in Valeria G. v. Wilson, the federal court challenge to Prop. 227, and one of several counsel in the state court challenge to Prop. 187 (Pedro A. v. Dawson). She is co-lead counsel in Quiroz v. State Board of Education, a challenge to limit the State Board of Education’s waiver authority. As lead counsel, she oversees a Consent Decree requiring the State to monitor services to limited English proficient (LEP) students (Comité v. State Superintendent). She has also participated in litigation challenging discriminatory enrollment, discipline and school uniform policies aimed at low-income/ immigrant students. She is representing Latino parents in administrative complaints filed with the Office for Civil Rights and the State Superintendent against both the Pittsburg and Oceanside school districts concerning their failure to provide alternative programs under Prop. 227’s parental waiver provisions. She has also engaged in extensive work in the legislative arena. Ms. Escobedo has been the recipient of several awards in recognition for her legal advocacy on behalf of immigrant students, including: the CA La Raza Lawyers Association’s Cruz Reynoso Community Service Award; the California Association for Bilingual Education’s Bilingual Education Advocacy Award; and the Hispanic National Hispanic Bar Association’s Award for Excellence in Public Service.
Richard Gray, Director of National Technical Assistance,
Community Involvement Program,
New York University Institute for Education and Social Policy
Richard Gray is the Director of National Technical Assistance with the Community Involvement Program at New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy. The Institute seeks to strengthen public education in New York City and other urban areas nationally and abroad by building the capacity for school improvement and reform among policymakers, educators, parents, and community-based organizations through policy studies, research, technical assistance and evaluations. From 1988 to 1996, Mr. Gray was a member of the staff at the National Coalition of Advocates for Students (NCAS), a nationwide network of child advocacy organizations that work to improve the access of quality public education to student populations who have traditionally been underserved by public schools. From 1988 to 1990, Mr. Gray was the Director of Core Programs and the Project Director of the Good Common School Project. The project produced a final report entitled The Good Common School: Making the Vision Work for All Children. Mr. Gray received his B.A. in History from Brown University and his J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Jack Greenberg, Professor of Law
Columbia Law School
Professor Greenberg argued before U.S. Supreme Court in forty cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, and other major civil rights cases. He was associate counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1949 to 1961 and Director-Counsel from 1961 to 1984. Professor Greenberg is the founder of the Earl Warren Legal Training Program and has participated in human rights missions to the Soviet Union, Poland, South Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Nepal, and elsewhere. He has served as a visiting professor at numerous universities both in the United States and overseas. Professor Greenberg was a founding member of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and sits on the boards of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Human Rights Watch (1978–98) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Among his many awards, he received the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001. Professor Greenberg’s publications include Race Relations and American Law (1959); “Litigation for Social Change,” (1973); Cases and Materials on Judicial Process and Social Change (1976); Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (1994); and articles on civil rights, capital punishment, and other subjects. Teaching interests include constitutional, civil rights, and human rights law, civil procedure, and South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. He received his B.A., his LLB, and his L.L.D. degrees from Columbia University.
Michael Hout, Professor
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Professor Hout holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1988 where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology from 1988-1991 and the Director of the Survey Research Center from 1992-1998. Professor Hout’s publications include a book entitled, Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, which he co-edited in 1996. His current research includes a working paper entitled, Educational Progress for African Americans and Latinos in the United States from the 1950’s to the 1990’s: The Interaction of Ancestry and Class. Professor Hout has published numerous articles and book chapters on inequality and stratification, political sociology, religion, methodology and demography. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hae Sin Kim, Principal
ASCEND Academy
Hae-Sin Kim is the principal of ASCEND. Before she joined ASCEND in 2001, she was a Special Education teacher at Bret Harte Middle School for six years and an assistant principal at Claremont Middle School for one year. Born in Seoul, Korea and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. Kim became a reforming educator in Oakland through Teach for America. Her experiences teaching learning disabled children, working with Teach for America, and studying at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University have firmed her conviction that all children must and can achieve at high levels, and she brings this conviction to Oakland’s small school movement and ASCEND.
Catherine Lhamon, Okrand/Wirin Attorney, ACLU of Southern California
Catherine Lhamon specializes in race-based civil rights cases, education reform and police practices issues. She currently focuses most of her time on a statewide class action, Williams v. State of California, which seeks to ensure that all California public school students have access at least to such educational essentials as textbooks, trained teachers, and safe and adequate school facilities. Before working at ACLU of Southern California, Ms. Lhamon was a supervising attorney in the Appellate Litigation Program at the Georgetown University Law Center. Immediately after law school, Ms. Lhamon clerked for Judge William A. Norris on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Amherst College.
Goodwin Liu, Acting Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley
Before joining the Boalt faculty in 2003, Goodwin Liu was an appellate litigator at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the 2000-01 term and for Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1998 to 1999. Professor Liu also served as special assistant to the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education from 1999 to 2000, and as senior program officer for higher education at the Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps) from 1993 to 1995. Professor Liu’s research interests include constitutional law, education law and policy, and social welfare policy. His publications include: “Separation Anxiety: Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution,” in the Georgetown Law Journal (with Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2003); “The Causation Fallacy: Bakke and the Basic Arithmetic of Selective Admissions,” in the Michigan Law Review (2002); “Affirmative Action in Higher Education: The Diversity Rationale and the Compelling Interest Test,” in Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (1998); “Real Options for School Choice,” in The New York Times (2002); and “The Myth and Math of Affirmative Action,” in The Washington Post (2002). Professor Liu is a member of the National Advisory Board for the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University and for the Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, D.C. He has also served on the steering committee for D.C. Lawyers’ Chapter of the American Constitution Society. He received his B.A. from Stanford University, his M.A. from Oxford University, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.
Reynaldo Macias, Professor and Chair
César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Reynaldo Macias has joint faculty appointments in the departments of Education and Applied Linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles. His previous academic appointment was in the UC Santa Barbara Dept. of Education, during which time he was also the Director of the University of California’s Linguistic Minority Research Institute from 1992-1997. The Institute is designed to focus the academic and research resources of the nine campuses of the University of California on improving the situation of language minorities in the California schools. He is the author, co author, and editor of six books and over three dozen research articles and chapters on such topics as bilingual education, teacher supply and demand, Chicanos and schooling, adult literacy, language choice, analyses of national language survey data, population projections, language policies, and media research. He received his B.A. degree in Sociology and a M.A. in Education (Early Childhood Curriculum and Instruction) from UCLA.
Jabari Mahiri, Co-Director
Center for Urban Education, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley
Jabari Mahiri is an Associate Professor in the Division of Language, Literacy, and Culture, and he is Co-Director of the Center for Urban Education at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is also the Principal Investigator for the Diversity Project that is focused on equity/achievement and school change at Berkeley High School. Dr. Mahiri conducts research on the literacy learning of urban youth — particularly African American students — in schools and outside of them. His focus is on successful social and academic development, writing development, and effective teaching and learning strategies in multicultural urban schools and communities. He helped found and chaired the board of directors of an alternative school in Chicago, New Concept Development Center that has been in existence for 32 years. He has also taught English in Chicago public high schools for seven years. He is author of Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998) and editor of What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (2003). He has also written a children’s book, The Day They Stole the Letter J (1989).
Meredith Maran, Author
Ms. Maran is the author of several books of non-fiction, including the bestsellers What It’s Like to Live Now, Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip, and Class Dismissed. She writes regularly for such publications as Self, Parenting, Utne Reader, Tikkun, O Magazine, New Woman, Mother Jones, Mademoiselle, Teacher, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News. Reviving Ophelia author Dr. Mary Pipher calls Maran’s latest book, Dirty “a useful, analytical, painful and hopeful book about adolescent culture on drugs. Read wisely, this book has the potential to transform the cultural landscape of America.”
Waldo Martin, Professor
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
Waldo Martin is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses related to African-American history and culture, U.S. Cultural and Social history—19th and 20th centuries, Modern Social Movements, the South, and America Since 1607. He holds a B.A. degree from Duke University (1973) and M.A. and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (1975 and 1980, respectively).
Dr. Martin’s recent publications include “A Change is Gonna Come: Black Freedom Struggle and the Transformation of America 1945-1975” (2002), “Black Liberation, Black Culture, and the Making of America: 1945-1980” (2001), “Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History With Documents” (1998) and “The Mind of Frederick Douglass” (1985). He has co-edited “Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia” (2000) and The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Titles published in this series include James Meriwether’s “Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961” (2002), Karen Ferguson’s “Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta” (2002), Patrick Rael’s “Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North” (2001) and Beth Bates’s “Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America 1925-1945” (2001). Dr. Martin has been the recipient of the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences honor, Stanford (2002-2003), Nathan 1. Huggins Lecturer, Harvard University (2001), Humanities Research Fellowship (1992-1993 and 1998), and the Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship for Minority-Group Scholars (1987-1988).
Miranda Massie, Attorney at Law
Scheff & Washington, P.C., Detroit, Michigan
Miranda Massie is a civil rights attorney at Scheff & Washington in Detroit, Michigan, a civil rights and union law firm. She was lead counsel for the student intervenors in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that resulted in a June 2003 Supreme Court victory for affirmative action. The intervenors were students and coalitions who intervened to argue that affirmative action is necessary for progress toward equality and integration, and to link the litigation to the growing new civil rights movement. Ms. Massie is an honors graduate of Cornell University and the NYU School of Law She also earned a M.A. degree in American Studies from Yale University, attending graduate school on a Yale University Fellowship while serving as a union organizer. She worked as a teacher and a university professor before attending law school. Ms. Massie has been an active force in organizing efforts for civil and reproductive rights, for educational equity, and for affirmative action throughout her career.
Rachel Moran, Professor of Law and Director of the UC Institute for the Study of Social Change, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
Rachel Moran is the Robert D. And Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and the Director of the UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Social Change. She is the author of “Interracial Intimacy”, “The Regulation of Race and Romance”, “Diversity and Its Discontents: The end of Affirmative Action at Boalt Hall”, 88 Calif. L. Rev. 2241, and “Bilingual Education, Immigration and the Culture of Disinvestment,” Iowa Journal of Gender, Race and Justice; “Diversity Distance, and the Delivery of Higher Education,” Ohio State Law Journal; and “What if Latinos Really Mattered in the Public Policy Debate?” California Law Review/La Raza Law Journal. She was a visiting professor at UCLA (1988), Stanford (1989), NYU School of Law (1996), the University of Miami Law School (1997) and the University of Texas (2000). From 1993 to 1996 Professor Moran served as chair of the Chicano/Latino Policy Project at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change. In 1995 she received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Moran is a member of the American Law Institute and the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Moran received her B.A from Stanford University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She clerked for Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and worked for the San Francisco firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. She joined the Boalt faculty in 1983.
Jeannie Oakes, Presidential Professor and Director
Institute for Democracy, Education & Access (IDEA),
University of California at Los Angeles
Jeannie Oakes is Presidential Professor in Educational Equity and Director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education & Access (IDEA) and UC’s All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity (ACCORD). Her research examines schooling inequalities and follows the progress of educators and activists seeking socially just schools. She is the author of 17 scholarly books and monographs and more than 100 published research reports, chapters, and articles. Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (Yale University Press, 1985) was named one of the top 60 books of the century by the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Ms. Oakes’ most recent book, Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Virtue in Education Reform (Jossey Bass, 2001) won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award.
Paul Ong, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Asian American Studies, School of Public Policy and Social Research, Department of Urban Planning, University of California at Los Angeles
Professor Ong has done research on the labor market status of minorities and immigrants, displaced high-tech workers, work and welfare and transportation access. He is currently engaged in several projects, including studies on the effects of neighborhood economies on welfare and work, community economic development in minority communities, and the labor market for healthcare workers.
Previous research projects have included studies of the impact of defense cuts on California’s once-dominant aerospace industry, the impact of immigration on the employment status of young African Americans, and the influence of car ownership and subsidized housing on welfare usage. He was co-author of a widely reported 1994 study on Asian Pacific Americans, which challenged the popular stereotype of Asians as the country’s “model minority” by showing they are just as likely as other groups to be impoverished. Dr. Ong has served as an advisor to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and to the California Department of Social Services and the state Department of Employment Development, as well as the Wellness Foundation and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Dr. Ong is currently the Director of the Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
Eva Paterson, Executive Director
Equal Justice Society
Ms. Paterson is the Executive Director, and a founder, of the Equal Justice Society, a national organization dedicated to changing the law through progressive legal theory, public policy and practice. Prior to taking the helm of the Equal Justice Society in 2003, Ms. Paterson worked at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights for twenty-six years, thirteen of them as Executive Director. She led the organization’s work providing free legal services to low-income individuals, litigating class action civil rights cases, and advocating for social justice. At the Lawyers’ Committee, she was part of a broad coalition that filed the groundbreaking anti-discrimination suit against race and gender discrimination by the San Francisco Fire Department. That lawsuit successfully desegregated the department, winning new opportunities for women and minority firefighters. Ms. Paterson co-founded and chaired the California Coalition for Civil Rights, and was a leading spokesperson in the campaigns against Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant) and Proposition 209 (anti-affirmative action) and numerous other statewide campaigns against the death penalty, juvenile incarceration and discrimination against lesbians and gay men. Ms. Paterson received her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Nina Robinson, Director of Policy & External Affairs
University of California, Office of the President
Nina Robinson is Director of Policy and External Affairs for undergraduate access and student services for the University of California system. In this role, she has worked actively on such issues as maintaining access to the University following the adoption of Proposition 209 and on the development of new policy with respect to the SAT and admissions testing in general and comprehensive review of undergraduate applications. Prior to taking on these responsibilities, Ms. Robinson served as Executive Director of Public Affairs for U.C. Berkeley and as its Director of Admissions and Enrollment Policy, Planning and Analysis. She was a public policy analyst and researcher in the Center for Studies in Higher Education, the Office of the President’s Planning and Analysis unit, and the Office of Institutional Research.
In the private sector, Ms. Robinson has worked at Deloitte Haskins & Sells, an international accounting and consulting firm that later became Deloitte & Touche, and was a communications consultant in Oakland, working with a variety of nonprofit and educational organizations.
Ms. Robinson received her B.A. degree in literature and visual arts in 1973 from the University of California, San Diego. From 1974 to 1977 she pursued a Ph.D. in English at Berkeley and, in 1989, received her M.A. degree from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
John Rogers, Adjunct Associate Professor
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, and Associate Professor of IDEA
John Rogers, Associate Director of Institute for Democracy, Education & Access (IDEA), Adjunct Associate Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, brings extensive experience in research and activism in school reform and community development in low-income communities of color. He studies strategies for engaging urban youth, community members and teachers as public intellectuals seeking to make schools places of equal opportunity and democratic life. Dr. Rogers is the founder and managing editor of Teaching to Change LA, an on-line journal. Presently, he is leading a public history project exploring the last 50 years of struggle for educational justice in Los Angeles. Dr. Rogers received his B.A. in Public Policy and African American Studies from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University.
Russell Rumberger, Professor
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Russell W. Rumberger is a Professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Education and a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University in 1978 and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1971. Professor Rumberger serves on the editorial board of four journals: American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Economics of Education Review, and the Sociology of Education. He conducts academic and policy research in two areas of education: education and work, and the schooling of disadvantaged students. His research in the area of education and work has focused on the economic payoffs to schooling and on educational requirements of work. His research on at-risk students has focused on several topics: the causes, consequences, and solutions to the problem of school dropouts; the causes and consequences of student mobility; the schooling of English language learners; and the impact of school segregation on student achievement.
L. Michael Russell, Deputy General Counsel
Los Angeles Unified School District
Michael Russell has served as the Deputy General Counsel of the Los Angeles Unified School District since 2001. Prior to joining LAUSD, Mr. Russell served as general counsel to two other corporations and as an associate at O’Melveny and Myers. Mr. Russell holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. from Stanford University. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and is on the Board of Governors for the University of Southern California Institute for Corporate Counsel.
Thomas Saenz, Vice President of Litigation
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)
Thomas A. Saenz is Vice President of Litigation at MALDEF. He oversees MALDEF’s efforts nationwide to pursue civil rights litigation in the areas of education, employment, political access, immigrants’ rights, and public resource equity. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1987 with a B.A. degree in history and political economy. Mr. Saenz joined MALDEF as a staff attorney in 1993; he became Los Angeles Regional Counsel in 1996, National Senior Counsel in 2000, and Vice President of Litigation in 2001. Mr. Saenz has served as counsel in numerous civil rights cases, involving such issues as affirmative action, educational equity, employment discrimination, immigrants’ rights, language rights, and day laborer rights. He served as MALDEF’s lead counsel in successfully challenging California’s Proposition 187 in court; he is also MALDEF’s lead counsel in two court challenges to Proposition 227. Mr. Saenz teaches “Civil Rights Litigation” as an adjunct lecturer at the U.S.C. Law School. He received his B.A. and his J.D. from Yale University in 1987 with a B.A. from Yale Law School in 1991.
Peter Schrag, Columnist and Author
Sacramento Bee
Peter Schrag, who served for 19 years as editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, is a lifelong journalist. He began his career as a reporter for the El Paso (Tex.) Herald Post; was associate education editor and executive editor of the Saturday Review; editor of Change Magazine, a journal covering higher education, and contributing editor to a number of other publications. He is now a senior correspondent for the American Prospect and continues to write a weekly column for the Bee that’s syndicated to other California newspapers. Mr. Schrag is the author of many articles in the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, Playboy, the American Prospect and other publications, and Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future. His new book, Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools has just been released.
Mr. Schrag has taught at Amherst College, where he also served as a college administrator, the University of Massachusetts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and at the Graduate School of Journalism and the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1998, he has also been a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.
Abdi Soltani, Executive Director
Californians for Justice
Abdi Soltani is the Executive Director of Californians for Justice Education Fund. For the past several years, Abdi has been deeply involved in a statewide campaign for equal educational opportunities in California. Abdi has been an organizer with CFJ since the No on 209 campaign in 1996, and has worked on bilingual education, immigrant rights, criminal justice, and economic justice issues. Most recently, Abdi served as treasurer of the Coalition for an Informed California/No on 54. Prior to joining CFJ, Abdi was a John Gardner Fellow, working at the Center for Third World Organizing. While a student at Stanford, Abdi organized on environmental justice issues and helped found Youth United for Community Action. Mr. Soltani was awarded the Gerbody Foundation fellowship in 2002. He received his B.S. degree in biology from Stanford University.”
Stephen Sugarman, Professor of Law
Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
Professor Sugarman joined the Boalt faculty in 1972. He regularly teaches Torts, and occasionally teaches Sports Law, Educational Policy and Law, and other courses in the social justice curriculum. Professor Sugarman has written four books with Boalt colleague John Coons: Private Wealth and Public Education (Harvard 1970); Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (California 1978); Scholarships for Children (IGS 1992); and, most recently, Making School Choice Work for All Families (PRI 1999). He and Coons also argued the landmark case Serrano v. Priest before the California Supreme Court. He has also written numerous law review articles on a range of subjects. Before coming to Boalt, Professor Sugarman served as acting director of the New York State Commission on the Cost, Quality and Financing of Education. Between 1967 and 1972 he was associated with the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny & Myers. At Boalt he served as associate dean from 1980 to 1982 and as director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute’s Family Law Program from 1988 to 1999. He received both his B.S. and J.D. degrees at Northwestern.
Dirk Tillotson, School Board President
American Indian Public Charter School, and Attorney
Dirk Tillotson is an attorney and doctoral student in Berkeley’s department of Jurisprudence and Social Policy, his dissertation evaluates different models of charter school governance. He has been studying charter schools for the last eight years and has served as a Board member on four charter schools in Oakland, giving him a broad base of experience that he brings to his work. He is currently president of the American Indian Charter School, which had the highest middle school performance gain in California last year. Mr. Tillotson also sits on the executive board of the West Oakland Community School, the highest scoring middle school for poor African American students in Oakland. He has been active as a consultant for a number of primarily-minority parent groups interested in greater participation in school governance at their children’s schools. Mr. Tillotson has been intimately involved with equitable education for all children throughout his professional life. He received his J.D. degree from Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley.
Lily Wong Fillmore, Professor
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley
Lily Wong Fillmore is the Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education. Much of her research has focused on issues related to the education of language minority students in American schools. Her professional specializations are second language learning and teaching, the education of language minority students, and the socialization of children for learning across cultures. Over the past thirty years, she has conducted studies of second language learners in school settings. Her most recent study is of the language resources of Alaskan Native children in several Yup’ik villages along the Yukon River. She is currently engaged in studies of the academic language demands of high stakes tests such as California’s High School Exit Examination and the SAT-9, and considerations of what kind of instructional support is needed by English language learners and speakers of English dialects (e.g., African-American English, Alaskan Village English, Chicano English, etc.) to deal successfully with such tests and other uses of academic language. Another area of work that has engaged Professor Fillmore in the past decade is the revitalization of indigenous languages in the Southwest. Her recent publications include “What Teachers Need to Know About Language” (with C. Snow); “Language in Education”; and “The Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?” She recently received an award from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports in recognition of her work promoting the learning and use of Spanish by Spanish speaking children in the United States.
John Yun, Assistant Professor
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor Yun’s training is in educational policy with a heavy dose of both economic and quantitative methodologies. While his methodological bent is primarily quantitative he has an interest in branching out to more mixed-methods approaches. Professor Yun’s research focuses on issues of equity in education, specifically patterns of school segregation; educational differences between private and public schools; the effect of funding, poverty, and opportunity on educational outcomes; and the educative/counter-educative impacts of high-stakes testing. Professor Yun is also a former San Antonio high school science teacher, reformed physics major, and past solicitations editor of the Harvard Educational Review. Professor Yun has an abiding interest in working with local schools on issues that concern them. Recent publications include Integrating neighborhoods, segregating schools: The retreat from school desegregation in the South, 1990-2000. North Carolina Law Review, 81, 1563-1596; Reardon, Sean & Yun, John T. (2001). Suburban racial change and suburban school segregation,1987-1995. Sociology of Education, 74(2), 79-101; The changing context of school segregation: Multi-racial measurement of school segregation from 1987-1997. Demography, 37(3), 351-364; and Mintz, Ethan, & Yun, John T. (Eds.). (1999). The complex world of teaching: Perspectives from theory and practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review Reprint Series