Pedro Noguera is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and the co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings (IGEMS).
An urban sociologist, Noguera’s scholarship and research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. Noguera has served as an advisor and engaged in collaborative research with several large urban school districts throughout the United States. He has also done research on issues related to education and economic and social development in the Caribbean, Latin America and several other countries throughout the world. From 2000 – 2003 Noguera served as the Judith K. Dimon Professor of Communities and Schools at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 1990 – 2000 he was a Professor in Social and Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of Education and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley.
Pedro Noguera has published over one hundred and fifty research articles, monographs and research reports on topics such as urban school reform, conditions that promote student achievement, youth violence, the potential impact of school choice and vouchers on urban public schools, and race and ethnic relations in American society. His work has appeared in several major research journals and many are available online at inmotionmagazine.com. He is the author of The Imperatives of Power: Political Change and the Social Basis of Regime Support in Grenada (Peter Lang Publishers, 1997), City Schools and the American Dream (Teachers College Press 2003 – winner of Foreward Magazine Gold Award), he is the co-editor of Beyond Resistance: Youth Activism and Community Change, (with Shawn Ginwright and Julio Camarota – Routledge 2006) and his most recent book is Unfinished Business: Closing the Achievement Gap in Our Nation’s Schools (with Jean Yonemura Wing – Josey Bass, 2006).
Diane Ravitch is Research Scholar of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the author of many books, most recently The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. A selection of her other books include, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Knopf, 2003; Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, Simon and Schuster, 2000; and The Great School Wars: A History of New York City Schools, John Hopkins University Press, 1974/2001.
Paul Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. He has written extensively about education, poverty and politics, including cover stories in the New York Times Magazine on the Harlem Children’s Zone, the post-Katrina school system in New Orleans, and No Child Left Behind and charter schools. He has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine and was the founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine. He has also worked as a reporter and producer for the public-radio program “This American Life,” where he reported, most recently, on the parents enrolled in the Harlem Children Zone’s Baby College. His writing has appeared in Slate, GQ, Esquire, and the New Yorker.
Liz Willen is editor of The Hechinger Report. She is a former senior writer focused on higher education at Bloomberg Markets magazine. Willen spent the bulk of her career covering the New York City public school system for Newsday. She has won numerous prizes for education coverage and shared the 2005 George Polk Award for health reporting with two Bloomberg colleagues. Willen is a graduate of Tufts University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and an active New York City public school parent.
Cornelia Grumman is Executive Director of the First Five Years Fund, an initiative aimed at improving the lives of at-risk children by leveraging larger and smarter federal investments in high-quality early childhood education, from birth to age 5. Prior to launching the First Five Years Fund, Grumman worked as a journalist at the Chicago Tribune, the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Daily Southtown in Chicago. In 2002, her series of editorials on Illinois’ death penalty helped prompt sweeping legislative reforms, including electronic taping of police interrogations in homicide cases, and won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. She lives in Chicago with her husband, journalist Jim Warren, and their two sons.
Janice Jackson is Executive Director of SCOPE. She worked previously at Harvard University, where she provided support for its program for Urban Superintendents Program and other leadership development initiatives such as the Wallace-funded leadership project for states and urban districts.
Jackson has been a faculty member and researcher at two universities, working in areas ranging from teaching and teacher education to leadership development. She has deep experience in supporting and running schools and school systems, including having served in the leadership cadre of three major urban school systems and as a consultant to many others. And she has worked in the policy arena at the federal level, as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the US Department of Education.
Jackson has also worked as a board member or consultant with a wide variety of major education organizations that support professional development; academic, social and emotional learning for students; and the pursuit of more equity.
Alex Kotlowitz is the author of Never a City So Real, The Other Side of the River and There Are No Children Here. Kotlowitz is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Public Radio’s This American Life. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal (where he was a staff writer for ten years,) as well as on PBS and NPR. His play An Unobstructed View (co-authored with Amy Dorn) premiered in Chicago in June of 2005. He teaches writing at Northwestern University. His journalism honors include the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award.
Amy Stuart Wells is a Professor of Sociology and Education and the Director of the Center for Understanding Race and Education (CURE) at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and writing has focused broadly on issues of race and education and more specifically on educational policies such as school desegregation, school choice, charter schools, and tracking and how they shape and constrain opportunities for students of color. Wells is currently directing two projects funded by the Ford Foundation: One is a study of urban-suburban demographic change and the role that public schools and their boundaries play in those changes titled “Metro Migrations, Racial Segregation and School Boundaries.” From 1999-2006, Wells was the principal investigator of a five-year study of adults who attended racially mixed high schools funded by the Spencer, Joyce and Ford Foundations. She is co-author of a book from this study, Both Sides Now: The Story of Desegregation’s Graduates (2009, UC Press), with Jennifer Jellison Holme, Anita Tijerina Revilla, and Awo Korantemaa Atanda. Wells is the author and editor of numerous other books and articles, including co-editor with Janice Petrovich of Bringing Equity Back: Research for a New Era in Educational Policy Making (2005, Teachers College Press); editor of Where Charter School Policy Fails: The Problems of Accountability and Equity (2002, Teachers College Press); co-author with Robert L. Crain of Stepping over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools (Yale University Press, 1997); ); and co-editor with A.H. Halsey, Hugh Lauder, and Phillip Brown of Education: Culture, Economy and Society (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College and a professor of political science at Columbia University. Henig has worked with the Spencer Fellowship as a mentor and advisor since its inception in 2007.
Henig’s scholarly interests revolve around the boundary between private action and public action in addressing social problems, including privatization, race and urban politics, the politics of urban education reform, and school choice.
He holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University in Illinois.
He is the author or coauthor of nine books, including The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton, 1999) and Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (Kansas, 2001), both of which were named–in 1999 and 2001, respectively–the best book written on urban politics by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates. The Case of Charter Schools (Russell Sage, 2008) focuses on the controversy surrounding the charter school study by the American Federation of Teachers and its implications for understanding politics, politicization, and the use of research to inform public discourse; it won the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Outstanding Book Award, 2010. Most recently, he is co-editor and contributor to Between Public and Private: Politics, Governance, and the New Portfolio Models for Urban School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2010).
Paul Goren currently serves as Special Advisor to Chicago Public Schools and Senior Advisor to the Urban Education Institute.
Goren is the immediate past Lewis-Sebring director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Prior to joining UEI, Goren served as senior vice president of The Spencer Foundation from 2001-2010 and as executive director of the Spencer Forum focusing on the dissemination of research to the policy and practice communities. Previously, Goren was the director of Child and Youth Development at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. A former middle-school teacher, Goren worked as executive director (assistant superintendent) for Policy and Strategic Services in the Minneapolis Public Schools from 1995-98 and as a policy analyst and educational researcher in the San Diego City Schools in the mid-1980s. He worked in and subsequently directed the education policy studies division of the National Governors’ Association (NGA) in Washington, DC between 1991 and 1995.
Goren has written on professional development and public engagement for the NGA, served as chief accountability officer in the Minneapolis Schools where he helped develop capacity for data driven-decision making, and led the Spencer Foundation’s efforts to disseminate studies and findings to multiple audiences. Along with numerous presentations at philanthropic, practitioner, policy, and research forums, he served on the National Academy of Science task force on How People Learn. His writing includes commentaries for the National Society for the Study of Education yearbook on Developing the Teacher Workforce, and for Education Week on the relationship of foundations and philanthropy to school districts. Goren received the Ian Axford (New Zealand) Fellowship in public policy through NZ Fulbright to study Maori education policy.
Goren serves on the board of TERC, a science and mathematics curriculum developer, and is on the executive committee of the Board of Y.O.U., a social service and support agency for students in the Evanston, IL public schools. He also serves on the Boards of the Donors Forum of Illinois and the national Grantmakers for Education organization.
Goren holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a master of public affairs degree from the LBJ School at the University of Texas, and a B.A. from Williams College.
Amy Wilkins is vice president for government affairs and communications at the Education Trust. An experienced political and community organizer with a special skill in media communications, Amy’s sharp advocacy skills were honed over years of successful work for the Children’s Defense Fund, the Democratic National Committee, the Peace Corps, and the White House Office of Media Affairs.