Richard Banks, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, Stanford University

An esteemed voice on wide range of topics related to equality, R. Richard Banks focuses his scholarship on the use of race in public policy debates ranging from the adoption of children to the use of educational testing criteria in college admissions. He is especially interested in the rhetoric of civil rights discourse and the ways in which attachments to theories of color blindness might impede progress toward substantive racial equality. Before attending law school, Professor Banks was an extensively published freelance journalist, writing articles for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, Professor Banks was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney with the firm O’Melveny and Myers. He was a law clerk to Judge Barrington D. Parker, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  Web page.

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Prudence Carter, Associate Professor, Stanford University; Co-Director Stanford, Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

Prudence L. Carter is an associate professor in the School of Education. She teaches a range of courses on racial and ethnic relations, social and cultural inequality, the sociology of education, urban education and research methods. Professor Carter's recent book, Keepin' It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press 2005), is the 2006 co-winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, (Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, American Sociological Association) for its contribution to the eradication of racism; a 2005 finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award (Society for the Study of Social Problems); and an a 2007 honorable mention recipient of the distinguished book award (Section on Race, Class, and Gender, American Sociological Association). Her current research agenda investigates how racial ideology, culture, and social boundaries interact and influence student behaviors in different national and urban school contexts. Web page.

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Alan Curtis, President and Chief Executive Officer, Eisenhower Foundation

Dr. Curtis was the Executive Director of President Carter's Interagency Urban and Regional Policy Group, served as Urban Policy Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and later administered the $43 million employment and crime prevention demonstration program in public housing that was part of National Urban Policy. Earlier, he was co-director of the Crimes of Violence Task Force of President Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He is author, co-author, or editor of 11 books and member of the Executive Committee of Partners for Democratic Change, which teaches democratic decision-making world-wide. He is a former trustee of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He has an A.B. in economics from Harvard, an M.Sc. in economics from the University of London and a Ph.D. in urban studies and criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. Web page.

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Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommon Professor, Stanford University; Co-Director, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

At Stanford, Darling-Hammond has launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, SRN LEADS, and SCOPE. Professor Darling-Hammond has also served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She was the founding Executive Director of the National Commission for Teaching and America's Future, the blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, catalyzed major policy changes across the United States to improve the quality of teacher education and teaching. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of teaching quality, school reform, and educational equity. Among her more than 200 publications is Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (Jossey-Bass: 2006), The Right to Learn, recipient of the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Book Award for 1998, and Teaching as the Learning Profession (co-edited with Gary Sykes), recipient of the National Staff Development Council's Outstanding Book Award for 2000. Web page.

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Patricia Gándara, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; Co-Director, The Civil Rights Project

Professor Gándara is co-director of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. Her research focuses on educational equity and access for low income and ethnic minority students, language policy, and the education of Mexican origin youth. She has just completed a study (with R. Rumberger) entitled “Resource Needs for California's English Learners,” as part of the statewide adequacy project. She is the author of numerous articles and several books, including the forthcoming, Understanding the Latino Education Gap, Why Latinos Don't Go to College (Harvard University Press), co-author of School Connections: U.S. Mexican Youth, Peers, and School Achievement (Teachers College Press, 2004) and co-editor of Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education: Leveraging Promise (SUNY Press, 2006). Web page.

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Kris Gutiérrez, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; CO-PI, UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families

Gutiérrez is CO-PI of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families; PI of the Studying the development of literacy and problem-solving competencies in an after-school computer program; PI of the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Learning: Examining Writing, Digital Story Telling, and Teatro as Tools for Learning for Migrant Students; and Co-PI, in a project sxamining the social organization of helping and learning in children's small group interactions in the U.S. and Mexico. She was the 2005 recipient of the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award. Her current research interests include a study of the sociocultural contexts of literacy development, particularly the study of the acquisition of academic literacy for language minority students. Her research also focuses on understanding the relationship between language, culture, development, and pedagogies of empowerment. Web page.

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Goodwin Liu, Associate Dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law; Co-Director, Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity

Professor Liu joined UC Berkeley School of Law in 2003. His primary areas of expertise are constitutional law, education policy, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. Along with Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., Liu is Co-Director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity, a multidisciplinary think tank on civil rights law and policy. Liu's recent work includes "Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights" in Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2008); "History Will Be Heard: An Appraisal of the Seattle/Louisville Decision" in Harvard Law & Policy Review (2008); "Improving Title I Funding Equity Across States, Districts, and Schools," in Iowa Law Review (2008). In 2007, his work won the Education Law Association's inaugural Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law. Before joining the Boalt faculty, Liu was an appellate litigator at O'Melveny & Myers in Washington. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the October 2000 term and for Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1998 to 1999. He 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. Web page.

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George Miller, U.S. Congressman; Chairman, House Committee on Education and Labor; Chairman, House Democratic Policy Committee

Miller is a leading advocate in Congress on education, labor, the economy, and the environment. He has represented the 7th District of California in the East Bay of San Francisco since 1975. He is a life-long Democrat and Californian. Miller is part of the Democratic Leadership, having been appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve as chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee in 2003; in that role, he is responsible for helping Democrats to develop and articulate a wide range of policies of benefit to all Americans. Miller was elected by his colleagues in January to serve as Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, a panel he has served on since first coming to Congress. Miller continues to serve on the House Natural Resources Committee; he was chairman of that Committee from 1991 to 1994. Web page.

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Gary Orfield, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; Co-Director, The Civil Rights Project       

Professor Orfield is interested in the study of civil rights, education policy, urban policy, and minority opportunity. He was co-founder and director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project and is now co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. Orfield's central interest has been the development and implementation of social policy, with a central focus on the impact of policy on equal opportunity for success in American society. He received the 2007 "Social Justice in Education" Award by the American Educational Research Association for "work that has had a profound impact on demonstrating the critical role of education research in supporting social justice." He is a member of the National Academy of Education. Web page.

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Dorothy Steele, Executive Director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Integrated Schools Project, Stanford University

Dorothy M. Steele, Ed.D. is the Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is an early childhood educator who is interested in public school reform including teaching practices that are effective for diverse classrooms, alternative assessment processes that inform teaching and learning, and strategies that build inclusive communities of learners in schools. Her work with the Stanford Integrated Schools Project is an attempt to look at these various aspects of schooling in a large urban school district. Steele began her work with teachers and children in 1968 in Columbus, OH  as the Director/Teacher of one of the city’s first Head Start Programs. During the 1970’s, she served as the Curriculum Coordinator for the City of Seattle’s Children’s Programs, an early childhood teacher educator, a parent educator, and, for eight years, the director of a large, university-based child care center. In 1987, Dr. Steele began her doctoral work in early childhood education and, with her advisor, developed an alternative assessment process for early childhood education that is being used throughout the world. 

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Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Stuart Wells received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Education from Teachers College in 1991 and since then her research on detracking in racially mixed schools, charter schools, and desegregation has been widely cited. Among her numerous publications, Stuart Wells is the editor of Multiple Meanings of Charter Schools: Lessons from Ten California Districts (forthcoming, Teachers College Press); co-author with Emeritus Professor Robert L. Crain of Stepping Over the Color Line African-American Students in White Suburban Schools (Yale University Press, 1997); and author of Time to Choose: America at the Crossroads of School Policy (Hill & Wang 1993). Web page.

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Greg Walton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

Greg Walton is an assistant professor of social psychology at Stanford University.  His research examines the role of social belonging in academic motivation and achievement, and the psychological origins of, and remedies for, group differences in academic achievement.  One intervention he conducted to sustain a sense of belonging among first-year college students raised the grades of ethnic minority students even years later.  Other work examines how psychological threats cause test scores and classroom grades to underestimate the true ability of ethnic minority students and, in quantitive fields, women.  In addition to his academic research, he served for a year as a Congressional Fellow in the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) in the United States Senate, where he worked primarily on issues relating to children and education. Web page.

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Kevin Welner, Associate Professor of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder; Director, CU-Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC)

Kevin Welner is associate professor of education policy and director of the CU-Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC). His present research examines small school reforms, tuition tax credit voucher policies, and various issues concerning the intersection between education rights litigation and educational opportunity scholarship. His past research studied the change process associated with equity-minded reform efforts - reforms aimed at benefiting those who hold less powerful school and community positions (primarily low-income students of color). Welner has received AERA's Early Career Award (in 2006) and Palmer O. Johnson Award (best article in 2004), the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Residency, and the Post-Doctoral Fellowship awarded by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Welner regularly teaches courses in educational policy, program evaluation, school law, and social foundations of education. His publications include Legal rights, local wrongs (2001, SUNY Press), Race-Conscious Policies for Assigning Students to Schools (with Bob Linn, 2007, National Academy of Education), Education Policy and Law: Current Issues (with Wendy Chi, 2008, Information Age Publishing), and NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling (2008, Rowman & Littlefield). Web page.

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