EDUCATION ROUNDTABLE:A Dialogue on Education Reform

& Addressing the Achievement Gap

THURSDAY, MAY 206:30pm-8:30pm

In Partnership with

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The Council of Urban Professionals works todevelop diverse business and civic leaders, empowering

them to exert their influence, achieve their individual goalsand create collective impact.

www.nycup.org

THE COUNCIL Of URBAN PROfESSIONALS

Presents

A Conversation With...

KRISTIN KEARNS JORDAN

Founder, Bronx Preparatory Charter School

PEDRO NOGUERA

Professor of Teaching & Learning,

NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education,

& Human Development

TRICIA ROSE

Professor & Chair of the Department of Africana Studies,

Brown University

Moderated By

OMAR WASOW

Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University

& Co-Founder, Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School

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SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

KRISTIN KEARNS JORDAN

Kristin Kearns Jordan is the founder and was until June of 2007 the director of the Bronx Preparatory Charter School: a classical, college preparatory middle and high school in the South Bronx. Bronx Prep opened in August of 2000 with 100 fifth and sixth graders selected by lottery. The first three classes of graduates are now all in college, attending schools ranging from Stanford to Georgetown to MIT to Swarthmore to Holy Cross to campuses of the SUNY and CUNY systems. Bronx Prep now serves nearly 700 5th –

12th grade students at a brand-new 70,000 square foot campus on Third Avenue and East 172nd Street.

The role of charter schools in overall public school reform efforts has been a consistent focus of Kristin’s, and she recently became a fellow with a new poverty-fighting effort in the Roxbury section of Boston called Boston Rising. She will focus on developing an education/school reform strategy within this neighborhood renewal effort.

Kristin grew up in Exeter, NH, attending public schools through 8th grade and Phillips Exeter Academy as a day student for high school. She attended college at Brown University.

Upon graduating from Brown in 1991, she moved to New York City and worked for five years at the Student/Sponsor Partners [S/SP], the last three years as Associate Executive Director. The S/SP is a high school financial aid and mentoring program, which pairs students with individual sponsor/mentors throughout New York City.

Kristin left the S/SP in 1996 to become a graduate student in history & education at Teachers College, Columbia University and for the 1996-1997 school year was a program associate at the Teachers College Center for Educational Outreach & Innovation.

From January 1997 through January 2000 Kristin served as the founding Executive Director of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation in New York City. The foundation is a private program that gives educational opportunity to more than 2000 low-income children by providing them with financial aid that can be used at private secular or parochial schools.

For several years after completing her staff role at the Student/Sponsor Partners, Kristin served on the S/SP board. During this time she also joined several S/SP board members to found the Reading Excellence and Discovery Program (READ), an early reading intervention program for children in public and parochial schools. She now serves on the board of her son’s school, the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, chairing its development committee. She also serves on the board and chairs the development committee of Bronx Prep.

PEDRO NOGUERA

Pedro Antonio Noguera is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also 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).

From 2000-2003, Dr. 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 of 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.

Dr. Noguera holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in sociology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. An urban sociologist, Dr. Noguera’s scholarship and research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. He 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.

Dr. Noguera is the author of numerous books, including The Trouble with Black Boys: And Other Refl ections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education and City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education.

TRICIA ROSE

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She spent her childhood in Harlem and the Bronx. She graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in the field of American Studies. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Professor Rose is most well-known for her ground-breaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, published in 1994 by Wesleyan Press, has since become a classic. It is considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what has eventually become a serious field of study. Black Noise won an

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MODERATOR BIOGRAPHY

OMAR WASOW

Omar Wasow, 38, is a Ph.D. candidate in African American studies and Government at Harvard. In addition to his graduate work, Omar is the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and an on-air technology analyst. Under Omar’s leadership BlackPlanet.com became the leading site for African Americans, reaching over three million people a month. Omar also works to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on shows like NBC’s Today,

CNN’s American Morning and public radio’s Tavis Smiley show. Similarly, Omar tutored Oprah Winfrey in her first exploration of the Net in the 12-part series ‘Oprah Goes Online’.

In 1999, as a result of his active participation in a number of social issues, particularly the charter school movement, Omar was selected to be a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program. In fall 2003, a K-8 charter school that Omar helped found opened in his hometown of Brooklyn. In 2007, in recognition of the promise of his academic research, the National Science Foundation selected him for a Graduate Research Fellowship. Most recently, the Aspen Institute selected him for their Henry Crown Fellowship that recognizes emerging leaders. He received his BA in Race and Ethnic Relations from Stanford University. He can be reached at owasow@gmail.com.

American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995 and was also considered one of the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice. In 1999, Black Issues in Higher Education listed Black Noise one of its “Top Books of the Twentieth Century.”

She is the co-editor of the youth music and youth culture collection: Microphone Fiends, and in 2003, Professor Rose published another path-breaking book. Her oral history of black women’s sexual life stories, Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy, put everyday black women’s sexual lives at the center of a conversation about women and sexuality which has generally marginalized these women’s own stories. It is a groundbreaking and powerful portrait of a wide range of black womens’ sexualities and the lives that surround them.

Professor Rose returned to hip hop with her recent book: THE HIP HOP WARS: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—And Why It Matters. In it, Rose argues that the music that most embodies the hallmarks of gangsta rap—drug dealing, sexual excess, rogue capitalism, sexism and distorted, violent portraits of black masculinity—now dominates the airwaves and the media. As a result, the most visible and most widely consumed hip hop sets forth a troubled vision of ghetto street life that not only defines young, already at-risk, black men and women to each other, but defines them to a large white audience as well, one which comprises seventy percent of hip hop consumers. Rose argues that hip hop is more important than ever in shaping racial images, identity and how we talk about race and culture in the United States—and the conversations surrounding it deserve attention.

Professor Rose is currently at work on a new book on the art and politics of interpersonal justice and community building as an important resource for creating a just society.

Rose lectures frequently to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of topics relating to American cultural politics, black culture and music and gender. Rose has also been featured as an expert commentator on NPR and other national and local radio outlets, and on television. More of her work can be found in articles appearing in magazines and newspapers such as Time, Essence, The New York Times and The Village Voice. She encourages visitors to connect with her on her website, www.triciarose.com, on Twitter and on Facebook.

EDUCATION ROUNDTABLE:A Dialogue on Education Reform

& Addressing the Achievement Gap

THURSDAY, MAY 206:30pm-8:30pm

In Partnership with