Fall Forum 2002 Featured Speakers

Keynote: Governor Howard Dean
Howard Dean, M.D., has served as Governor of the state of Vermont since 1991. Over the past decade, Governor Dean has led Vermont with a firm fiscal discipline, an unwavering commitment to children’s health care and education, and a strong focus on environmental protection. During his tenure, Vermont has emerged as a national leader in the areas of childhood health and wellness, national health care reform, and innovative school improvement and assessment. He has served on the National Education Goals Panel, as Chair of the National Governors’ Association in the 1994-1995 term, and continues to lead the NGA's efforts to improve the coordination of children's health care, education, and social services programs. Governor Dean has recently announced his intention to run for President in 2004.

Ernesto Cortés, Jr.
Mr. Cortés is the Southwest Regional Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). A nationally recognized expert and speaker on community organizing, Cortés envisioned and launched an innovative education initiative with goals to identify and train parent and community leaders to change the culture of schools, and to build a broad constituency of support for education reform both locally and statewide. He has served on a number of commissions and boards, including the Public Education Network, the Pew Forum for K-12 Education Reform, the Carnegie Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

Deborah Meier
Deborah Meier is currently the principal of Mission Hill Elementary School in Boston. She has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, writer, and public advocate. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary and secondary schools in East Harlem and the founder-principal of Central Park East Secondary School. Meier is the author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem, Will Standards Save Public Education?, and the recently published In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization.

Pedro Noguera
Pedro Noguera is currently the Judith K. Dimon Professor of Communities and Schools at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the ways in which schools respond to social and economic forces within the urban environment. He has engaged in collaborative research with several large, urban school districts, and he has published and lectured on topics such as youth violence, race relations within schools, the potential impact of school choice and vouchers on urban public schools, and secondary issues resulting from desegregation in public schools.

Hugh B. Price
Hugh B. Price is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League, the oldest and largest community-based movement empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream. He has served on the Editorial Board of The New York Times, where he wrote editorials on a broad range of topics, such as education, criminal justice, and urban policy. As Vice-President of the Rockefeller Foundation, he supervised all grant making in the fields of urban school reform and equal opportunity. He is the author of the recently published book, Achievement Matters: Getting Your Child the Best Education Possible.

Theodore R. Sizer
Theodore R. Sizer is the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools. He is Professor Emeritus at Brown University, where he served as chair of the education department from 1984-1989. Three of his books, Horace's Compromise, Horace's School, and Horace's Hope, explore the motivation and ideas of the CES school reform effort. His most recent book, co-authored by Nancy Faust Sizer, is entitled The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. Currently, he is teaching a course on education policy at Brandeis University as well as a secondary school design course at Harvard University.

Connie Spinner
C. Vannessa Spinner, "Connie," is the State Education Officer for the District of Columbia. She is responsible for enhancing the efficiency of state-level education functions and ensuring equitable distribution of education resources to District of Columbia residents. Prior to this assignment, she served as the Executive Director for the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation and as Director of Education for the Public Education Network, a national association of local non-profits whose mission is to support public education by influencing policy and increasing citizen engagement. She has 23 years of professional experience with the D.C. Public Schools in a variety of administrative and teaching positions

Ray Suarez
Ray Suarez is a senior correspondent for the PBS news program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He has twenty-five years of varied experience in the news business, including a six-year stint as the host of the nationwide, call-in news program Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio. A longtime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Suarez is a founding member of the Chicago Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is also the author of the recent book, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lives in Washington, where he is a parent in the D.C. public schools

Deborah Wadsworth
Deborah Wadsworth is President of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public opinion research and citizen education organization. Over the past decade, her work has centered on creating relationships with educational organizations, policy research groups, print and broadcast media, foundations, and corporations to improve the quality of public deliberation. She has spoken and written widely on major public policy issues, including a chapter exploring the effect media have on education reform efforts in Imaging Education: The Media and Schools in America and an article on parental involvement in the journal Public Perspective entitled, "Parents Parent, Teachers Teach."