Superintendent Donald Evans invites you to join Onward and Upward, his speaker series on equity and excellence in education for the Berkeley community developed in partnership with the Berkeley Graduate School of Education.
The superintendent’s speaker series is made possible with funding from the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund and is an extension of Berkeley’s 2020 Vision that was launched ten years ago by key civic and educational partners in pursuit of equitable educational outcomes for all students.
TALENT DEVELOPMENT FOR ALL STUDENTS: RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
Location: Longfellow Middle School Auditorium
Blog Post with Event Details and Presentation Slides
Students from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds are frequently underrepresented in gifted and talented education programs. Dr. Worrell studies the psychological factors and educational contexts that promote talent development. He will discuss how schools and districts can provide equitable talent development opportunities for all.
Why Diversity Is Not Integration
Location: Longfellow Middle School Auditorium
Blog Post with Event Details and Presentation Slides
Dr. Carter looks at how school communities can foster empathy among people of varied social backgrounds as they teach, learn, communicate, and interact in ways that can fortify our democracy. She’ll help us think about the role each of us plays in promoting integration and educational equity.
Dr. Carter is currently the Dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Education and serves on the Leadership Team for Berkeley’s 2020 Vision: Equity in Education. You can read more about her in the short bio below.
MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION BEYOND THE COLOR-BIND
Location: Longfellow Middle School Auditorium
Blog post with presentation summary
How does the U.S. society identify you? How do you identify yourself? These are some of the questions Dr. Mahiri has used to design lessons to help students think more critically about equity, race, empathy, and understanding of their own identity and people who are different from them.
AUTHOR OF THE COLOR OF LAW
Location: Berkeley High School Little Theater
Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America, and Distinguished Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, will offer an afternoon speaking event on Tuesday, March 5 at 4:30pm at Berkeley High School.
Richard Rothstein will join Dr. Evans in the final event of the Superintendent’s Speaker Series to look at how government actions, practices and policies interacted historically to create a powerful system of residential segregation in every metropolitan area in the U.S., and how African American students in our nation’s public schools were particularly disadvantaged. Among other insights, he’ll help the audience think about constitutionally required laws and new legal frameworks that can be used to redress the segregation of neighborhoods and schools.
More information on the event webpage.
Earlier this year we were fortunate to have school desegregation icon and education advocate Sylvia Mendez visit and speak to the Sylvia Mendez School community on September 14, 2018. Naming the elementary school, formerly known as LeConte School, after Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Sylvia Mendez was especially fitting given that it happened in the same year that we are commemorating 50 years since Berkeley voluntarily desegregated all of its schools in 1968.
Speaker Biographies
Prudence L. Carter is Dean of the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. Her expertise ranges from issues of youth identity and race, class, and gender; urban poverty; social and cultural inequality; the sociology of education; and mixed research methods. She examines academic and mobility differences shaped by the effects of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Her books include the award-winning, Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press, 2005). Among her professional affiliations, Dean Carter she is an elected a member of the National Academy of Education; the Sociological Research Association; and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. https://gse.berkeley.edu/people/prudence-l-carter
Jabari Mahiri holds the William and Mary Jane Brinton Family Chair in Urban Teaching at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is Faculty Advisor for the Bay Area Writing Project; a board member of the National Writing Project; and was a board member of the American Educational Research Association (2014 to 2017). Mahiri’s most recent book is Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind (Teachers College Press, 2017). Mahiri received UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence; the Chancellor’s Award for Community Service; and the Leon Henkin Citation for Distinguished Service and Commitment to Equity and Diversity. https://gse.berkeley.edu/people/jabari-mahiri
Frank C. Worrell is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley, where he serves as Director of the School Psychology program; Faculty Director of the Academic Talent Development Program; and Faculty Director of the California College Preparatory Academy. His areas of expertise include academic talent development/gifted education; at-risk youth; cultural identities; scale development and validation; teacher effectiveness; time perspective; and the translation of psychological research findings into school-based practice. With Rhona S. Weinstein, he co-edited Achieving College Dreams: How a University-Charter District Partnership Created an Early College High-School (Oxford University Press, 2016). https://gse.berkeley.edu/people/frank-c-worrell
Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow, emeritus, at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. The book recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. He is also the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008); Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004); and The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003). He welcomes comments at riroth@epi.org.
