Speakers: The Unfinished Legacy of Brown v Board of Education at 70

Keynote Speakers

Sean Reardon

sean reardon is the endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and is Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. reardon is the developer of the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) and Faculty Director of the Educational Opportunity Project. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ann Owens

Ann Owens is Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Public Policy and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on the causes and consequences of social inequality, with a focus on neighborhood and school segregation and how housing and educational policies cause or alleviate social inequalities. Ann received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University and is a recipient of the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Award, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Studies Fellowship, and the 2022 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. With sean f. reardon, Ann co-leads the Segregation Index, a research collective investigating residential and school segregation (www.segindex.org).

Catherine Lhamon

Catherine E. Lhamon is the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, where she has served since the United States Senate confirmed her in October 2021 following President Biden’s nomination for her in May 2021. From January through October 2021, Assistant Secretary Lhamon served as Deputy Assistant to President Biden for Racial Justice and Equity, where she managed the President's equity policy portfolio.  From December 2016 until January 2021, she chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to which President Obama appointed her. She also served in California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Cabinet as Legal Affairs Secretary from January 2019 through January 2021. Before these roles, Lhamon had also been Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, to which President Obama nominated her and the Senate confirmed her in 2013. In addition to her government service, Lhamon has litigated civil rights cases at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, National Center for Youth Law, and Public Counsel Law Center. Earlier in her career, Lhamon taught federal civil rights appeals at Georgetown University Law Center in the Appellate Litigation Program and clerked for the Honorable William A. Norris on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Lhamon received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was the Outstanding Woman Law Graduate, and she graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College.

 

Prudence Carter

Prudence L. Carter is Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology at Brown University.  Prior to coming to Brown, Carter was E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley from 2016-2021. Professor Carter’s research focuses on explanations of enduring inequalities in education and society and their potential solutions. Specifically, she examines academic and mobility disparities shaped by the effects of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the United States and global society.

Panelists

Kalena Cortes

Kalena E. Cortes, Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professor in the Department of Public Service and Administration at Texas A&M University, is the inaugural Director of the Bush School’s Program in Education Policy. Her research focuses on issues of equity and access, in particular, identifying educational policies that help disadvantaged students at the PreK-12 and postsecondary levels. She has worked on three key areas: improving academic performance of urban students, increasing access to postsecondary education, and raising educational attainment of immigrant students.

Thurston Domina

Thurston Domina, is Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's School of Education. Dr. Domina works with educational practitioners to better understand the relationship between education and social inequality in the contemporary U.S. and to identify educational policies and strategies that help to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive society. He studies the practice and politics of contemporary school diversity efforts in close collaboration with North Carolina's Wake County Public School System. His 2021 paper investigating the consequences of diversity-motivated school reassignments for reassigned students won the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award for best paper published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Rucker Johnson

Rucker C. Johnson is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As a labor economist who specializes in the economics of education, Johnson’s work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances.

 

Bob Kim

Robert Kim is Executive Director at the Education Law Center and has engaged in civil and education rights law and policy for more than 25 years, including as staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, and Senior Counsel and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Operations and Outreach in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama Administration. A leading expert and author in education law and policy, Mr. Kim has written extensively on a wide range of legal and policy issues impacting public education.

Irene Lo

Irene is an assistant professor in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. Her research is on designing matching markets and assignment processes to improve market outcomes, with a focus on public sector applications and socially responsible operations research. She is also interested in mechanism design for social good and graph theory.

Tomás E. Monarrez

Tomás E. Monarrez is a senior research fellow in the Consumer Finance Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. As a labor economist studying the economics of education, Tomás’ research focuses on education finance and racial inequality. His current research examines the state of the federal student loan program, specifically trends in student loan repayment, the student loan crisis, and the income-driven repayment program. Tomás has also done extensive research on the impact of local government policies on inequality and segregation in U.S. urban spaces and public education systems.

Myron Orfield

Myron Orfield is the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law, and Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity  at the University of Minnesota. He has written three books and dozens of articles and book chapters on region planning, state and local government law, spatial inequality, fair housing, school desegregation, charter schools, state and local taxation and finance, and land use law. His research has led to legislative, administrative and doctrinal reforms at the federal level and at the state level in Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, and Maryland. Prior to becoming an academic, Orfield was elected to the Minnesota House and Senate where he was involved in passing regional fair housing legislation and implementing a city suburban school desegregation remedy. 

Kimberly Robinson

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is a professor at the School of Law as well as a professor at both the School of Education and Human Development, and the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She is one of the nation’s leading education law experts and speaks throughout the United States about K-20 educational equity, school funding, education and democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights, Title IX and federalism.

Elizabeth Setren

Elizabeth Setren is the Gunnar Myrdal Assistant Professor in Economics at Tufts University. Her research in the economics of education and labor economics includes studying the impact of Boston charter schools on special education students and English Language Learners, the scaling of the Boston charter sector, and the effects of education technology.

Marissa Thompson

Marissa Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and socioeconomic inequality, with an emphasis on understanding the role of education in shaping disparate outcomes over the life-course. Her current research investigates, for example, parental preferences regarding school segregation, the causal effects of first-dollar scholarship policies on college access, and the role of genetic ancestry tests in racial boundary-making processes.

 

Moderators

Michael Hines

Michael Hines is a historian of American education whose work concentrates on the activism of Black teachers, students, and communities during the Progressive Era (1890s-1940s). He is an Assistant Professor of Education at Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and an affiliated faculty member with the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Hines’ first book, A Worthy Piece of Work (Beacon Press, 2022) details how African Americans educator activists in the early twentieth century created new curricular discourses around race and historical representation. Dr. Hines has published peer reviewed articles and book chapters in outlets including the Journal of African American History, History of Education Quarterly, Review of Educational Research, and the Journal of the History Childhood and Youth. He has also written for popular outlets including the Washington Post, Time magazine, and Chalkbeat. He teaches courses including History of Education in the U.S., and Education for Liberation: A History of African American Education, 1800-The Present.

 

Ralph Richard Banks

Ralph Richard Banks (who goes by Rick) is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a professor, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is the Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, which through its analysis of contentious issues and policy reform work aims to help counter the division that plagues American society. His current book project, tentatively titled, The Miseducation of America, addresses the crisis of higher education.

 

 

 

Francis Pearman

Francis A. Pearman is an Assistant Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His research focuses on how poverty and inequality shape the life chances of children, especially in rapidly changing cities.