Stanford, CA — Some of the nation's leading education and civil rights experts will gather on Friday, October 3, for a daylong forum on education and equity to be held at Stanford University. The forum, "Education and Opportunity: The Kerner Commission Forty Year Report," will focus on the 40-year update report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission). The original report, released in March 1968 in response to the wave of civil disorders around the nation, concluded that, "Our nation is moving towards two societies - one white, one black - separate and unequal."
Forty years later, the Eisenhower Foundation, which periodically updates the commission findings, has released a preliminary report on the status of civil disorder today. The October 3 forum, hosted by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), is focusing in on education as the foundation to create change in the much broader scope of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and crime that the Kerner Commission report addresses.
Featured speakers at the forum are Congressman George Miller, Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford University), Gary Orfield (UCLA), Richard Banks (Stanford University), Prudence Carter (Stanford University), Alan Curtis (Eisenhower Foundation), Patricia Gandara (UCLA), Kris Gutierrez (UCLA), Goodwin Liu (UC Berkeley), Dorothy Steele (Stanford University), Amy Stuart Wells (Teachers College, Columbia University), Gregory Walton (Stanford University), and Kevin Welner (University of Colorado at Boulder).
The forum is co-sponsored by the Stanford University School of Education, the Eisenhower Foundation, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, the Warren Institute at UC Berkeley's School of Law, and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. SCOPE is an affiliate of Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
The forum is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and registration is required. The public may register at http://edpolicy.stanford.edu or contact scope@stanford.edu; 650.725.8600.
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About the Kerner report
The initial report was released in March 1968, in response to the wave of civil disorders around the nation between 1963 to 1967. The report was written by the bipartisan National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by President Lyndon Johnson.
The Commission (which became known as the Kerner Commission, after then-Illinois Governor Otto Kerner) believed that it was “time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens - urban and rural, White and Black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.” Forty years later, the Eisenhower Foundation, which periodically updates the commission findings, has released a preliminary report on the status of civil disorder today. The report is titled, What Together We Can Do: A Forty Year Update of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders: Preliminary Findings.
About SCOPE
SCOPE was formed in the summer of 2008 to develop research, policy, and practice strategies for addressing issues of educational inequality in American education. At the heart of all SCOPE's work, is the recognition that access to a high-quality education for all citizens is at the core of a successful democracy, and that the importance of education to individual and social well-being is growing ever greater as the world evolves a knowledge-based economy. SCOPE was established in the spring of 2008 in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity to develop research, policy, and practice strategies for addressing issues of educational inequity. The forum is SCOPE's inaugural event.
About the panel members
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. Before attending law school, Banks was an extensively published freelance journalist. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, Banks was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and an attorney with the firm O'Melveny and Myers.
Prudence Carter, Associate Professor, Stanford University; Co-Director Stanford, Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
Carter teaches a range of courses on racial and ethnic relations, social and cultural inequality, the sociology of education, urban education and research methods. Her most recent book is the award-winning Keepin' It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press 2005). Her current research investigates how racial ideology, culture, and social boundaries interact and influence student behaviors in different national and urban school contexts.
Alan Curtis, President and Chief Executive Officer, Eisenhower Foundation
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.
Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun 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. She 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; the award-winning book, The Right to Learn; and Teaching as the Learning Profession, also an award-winning book.
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).
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 examining 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.
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.
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.
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.
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; co-author of Stepping Over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools; and author of Time to Choose: America at the Crossroads of School Policy.
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 Clinton, where he worked primarily on issues relating to children and education.
Kevin Welner, Associate Professor of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder; Director, CU-Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC)
Welner's 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, Race-Conscious Policies for Assigning Students to Schools (with Bob Linn), Education Policy and Law: Current Issues (with Wendy Chi), and NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.
