Board of Directors

Patrick Brennan is the Founder and CEO of Rooster Public Strategies. He has more than 15 years of public policy experience in both California and Washington, D.C. He works with companies and non-profit organizations to engage local, state, and federal legislators. Patrick serves as a member of the Ambassadors Circle at the University of California San Francisco’s Dyslexia Center, whose mission is to eliminate the debilitating effects of developmental dyslexia, while preserving and even enhancing the relative strengths of each individual. Patrick graduated from U.N.C.’s Kenan-Flagler Business School with a concentration in Finance and Wake Forest University with a B.A. in Political Science. He is active in his community and has chaired on multiple occasions the Washington Winter Ball, raising more than $5 million to benefit the Center for Employment Training at So Others Might Eat (“SOME”), Washington, D.C.’s oldest workforce-development charity.

President, Executive Board

Suzanne Donovan is Executive Director of the SERP Institute, where she is building a program of work in partnership with school districts, and anchored in classroom and school practice. She was primary author and co-editor of the two SERP reports: Strategic Education Research Partnership proposed the design and governance structure of the SERP Institute, and Learning and Instruction: A SERP Research Agenda details an illustrative research and development agenda directly tied to classroom practice. Suzanne has also directed the "How People Learn" Project at the National Academies since 1999. She served as study director and editor of the most recent report in the series: How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom, which was published in 2005. She was also the study director and co-editor for the NRC report Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education, and was a co-editor of Eager to Learn: Educating our Preschoolers. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley. Before joining the National Research Council, she was on the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Dr. Escobedo is currently the Executive Director of the National Center for Urban School Transformation (NCUST); he also serves as a member of the State Board of Education (SBE) and as part of the Board of Directors for WestEd. Dr. Francisco Escobedo has been an educator for the better part of 30 years. From November 2010 until August 2021, he was the Superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD). Located in southern San Diego County, the District’s 46 schools serve over 29,400 students. In 2019, the Learning Policy Institute identified CVESD as one of seven “California Positive Outlier” districts for its superior academic scores. Since 2001, Dr. Escobedo has served as adjunct professor of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University (SDSU) and is currently a member of the doctoral faculty. He earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University; M.A. degree from SDSU; and Ed.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and SDSU.  He is fluent in Spanish and serves as a co-chair on the State Superintendent’s Literacy Task Force.

Louis Gomez holds the MacArthur Chair in Digital Media and Learning in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Gomez has served since 2008 as Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he leads the Network Development work. Beginning in 2009, he held the Helen S. Faison Chair in Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was also director of the Center for Urban Education and a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center. From 2001 to 2008, he held a number of faculty appointments at Northwestern University, including the Aon Chair in the Learning Sciences at the School of Education and Social Policy. Prior to joining academia, he spent 14 years working in cognitive science and person–computer systems and interactions at Bell Laboratories, Bell Communications Research Inc. and Bellcore. His research interests have encompassed the application of computing and networking technology to teaching and learning, applied cognitive science, human-computer interactions and other areas. Gomez received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 and a doctorate in cognitive psychology from UC Berkeley in 1979.

Vice President, Executive Board

Bill Honig was educated as an attorney, graduated from Boalt Hall, clerked for a California Supreme Court Justice, and practiced commercial law with a San Francisco law firm. He switched from law to education and became an elementary teacher in Hunter’s point in San Francisco and a superintendent in Marin, before being appointed to the State Board of Education by Governor Brown in his first term. He then ran and won for State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1983-1993. In 1995, he started a company which trained teachers in reading and math, which lasted from 1995-2017 and then was donated to a non-profit group in 2017. He was Chair and then Vice Chair of the California Instructional Quality Commission, which produced the state frameworks for Common Core standards for the past six years. Bill Honig’s family owns a winery, which they acquired in 1967 in Napa, Honig Winery, and he is on their governing Board. He has also created a website on educational policy, buildingbetterschools.com, and has authored two books on education.

Gloria Ladson-Billings is Professor Emerita and former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction and was Faculty Affiliate in the Departments of Educational Policy Studies, Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis and Afro American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the Immediate Past President of the National Academy of Education. She was the 2005--2006 president of the American Educational Research Association. In 2021 she was named a Corresponding Fellow the British Academy. She is a 2020-2021 Hagler Institute Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Ladson-Billings’ research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. She also investigates Critical Race Theory applications to education.

Chairperson, Executive Board

Catherine Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, carries out research on language and literacy development in monolingual and bilingual children. She chaired the committee that produced the National Research Council Report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998), the RAND Reading Study Group that produced Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (2002), and the National Research Council that produced Assessing Young Children: What, When and Why. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. Her research focuses on the social-interactive origins of language and literacy skills, the ways in which oral language skills relate to literacy learning, the literacy development of English Language Learners, and implications of research on language and literacy development for teacher preparation.

Executive Vice President, Executive Board

Dr. Carey M. Wright became the State Superintendent of Education for Mississippi in 2013.  Under her leadership, Mississippi has initiated aggressive education reforms that have increased literacy skills in pre-K through the 3rd grade, pushed student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to improve at a faster rate than most other states, and increased the graduation rate to an all-time high of 83 percent. Dr. Wright spearheaded initiatives in Mississippi that nearly doubled the Advancement Placement (AP) participation and success rate, resulted in significant annual gains in English Language Arts and Mathematics proficiency, and earned Mississippi recognition from the National Institute for Early Education Research as one of only six states in the nation that meet all quality standards for early childhood education. Dr. Wright is president of the Board of Directors of the Council of Chief State School Officers and is a member of Chiefs for Change.