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"State of the Schools: What Next for L.A. and the Nation?" Is Subject of Feb. 13 Occidental Policy Forum

Joining Romer and Rothstein will be Sonia Hernandez, president and CEO of the Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement; Terry M. Moe, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and co-author of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools; and Occidental President Theodore R. Mitchell, former dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

Occidental Distinguished Senior Fellow Matt Miller, a syndicated columnist and host of KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center,” will host the 5 p.m. discussion in Occidental’s Thorne Hall. The event is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer session will follow the panel discussion.

“As the focus turns to domestic issues in the days following President Bush’s state of the union address and new budget – not to mention the new bipartisan education bill – you couldn’t assembly a more timely or relevant group of thinkers and officials to examine where we go from here,” Miller said.

As superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest public school district in the country, Roy Romer has spent the last two years trying to reform what the Los Angeles Times has called “the nation’s most mixed-up school system.” In his most recent review by the school board, Romer was praised for his “profound commitment to reforming urban education for all our children. … He takes on tough challenges with an innovative spirit and exceptional drive."

Richard Rothstein is the national education columnist for the New York Times, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, and a founding member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of American’s Student Achievement (Century Foundation Press) and co-author of Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools? (Economic Policy Institute).

A former public school teacher, principal and administrator, Sonia Hernandez is president and CEO of the non-profit Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement, formed in 2000 from the merger of LAAMP and LEARN, the two leading Los Angeles-based education reform groups. Before joining the Alliance, Hernandez worked as a deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction at the California Department of Education.

Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 education, and a professor of political science at Stanford University. His book Politics, Markets, and American Schools (co-authored with John E. Chubb) is among the most influential and controversial works on education to be published during the last decade. He also is author of Schools, Vouchers and the American Public, the first detailed analysis of public opinion on the voucher issue.

Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College, is the former dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Science. Mitchell is a national leader in the effort to provide high-quality education for all students and has long been active in California and Los Angeles educational reform initiatives. He is an education advisor to California Senator Dianne Feinstein and served as a senior education advisor to then-Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

The Occidental Policy Forum was created to give senior fellows the means to convene leading cultural, political and economic figures to address vital public issues. The position of senior fellow at Occidental was created through an innovative grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust to support solution-oriented public journalism.

Maps and directions to the Occidental campus can be found online at http://www.oxy.edu/MapsDirections.xml.