The purpose of the California Dropout Research Project is to help formulate better policy to address the dropout problem in California. In order to do that, the Project created a Policy Committee to formulate a set of policy recommendations based on the results of the research.

The Policy Committee consisted of the Project Director and seven other members: two policymakers, two educators (one county superintendent and one district superintendent), two scholars, and one community activist.

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  California State Senator Darrell Steinberg, Democrat , Senate District 6 (Sacramento). Chairs the Senate Select Committee on High School Graduation. He earned a BA in economics from UCLA and a JD from UC Davis Law School. Prior to his election to the State Assembly in 1998, Steinberg served on the Sacramento City Council, where he founded Sacramento START (Students Today Achieving Results for Tomorrow), a free literacy-based public/private after-school program. START has since become a model for both statewide and national after school programs.

 

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  California State Assemblywoman Jean Fuller, Republican, Assembly District 32, who previously served as District Superintendent of Bakersfield Unified School District. Completed her Bachelor, Masters and Ph.D degrees through the Califonia State University and the University of California systems, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has been an educator in California since the early 1970s.

 

 

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  David W. Gordon, Sacramento County Superintendent of Schools and member of the Governor's Advisory Committee on Education Excellence. Prior to joining the Sacramento County Office of Education in July 2004, Gordon served as Superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified School District from 1995 to 2004. Elk Grove is an ethnically and economically diverse district of more than 55,600 students covering 320 square miles of Sacramento County, California.

 

 

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  Rowena Lagrosa, Superintendent, Moreno Valley Unified School District. Lagrosa previously served as the Executive Officer of Educational Services for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). She now oversees Riverside County's third-largest school district. Prior to her appointment in LAUSD, Lagrosa was the Superintendent of Local District 5. As one of eight Local District Superintendents in the LAUSD, she supervised the instructional program for 96,000 students at 90 school sites.

 

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  Gary Orfield, Professor of Education, Law, Political Science, and Urban Planning, and Co-Director of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA. In addition to promoting desegregation, Orfield has written books and spoken out against standardized testing, and particularly the use of test scores to deny high school graduation. Recent works include studies of changing patterns of school desegregation and the impact of diversity on the educational experiences of law students.

 

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  Lorraine McDonnell, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of several studies on policy instruments: the mechanisms that policymakers can use to affect change in schools. President-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the national education research society with approximately 25,000 members.

 

 

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  Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Executive Director, Community Coalition, a Los Angeles institution created in 1990 to "transform the social and economic conditions that foster addiction, crime, violence, and poverty by building a permanent community institute involving thousands of people in creating, influencing, and changing public policy."

 

 

 

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  Russell W. Rumberger, Director, California Dropout Research Project
  

  Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute (UC LMRI).

  Rumberger received his Ph.D. in Education and a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University in 1978, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1971.

  A faculty member at UCSB since 1987, Rumberger, has published widely in several areas of education: education and work; the schooling of disadvantaged students, particularly school dropouts and linguistic minority students; school effectiveness; and education policy.

  Rumberger has been conducting research on school dropouts for the past 25 years and has written over 27 research papers and essays on school dropouts. He also served as a member of the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute of Statistical Sciences/Education Statistics Services Institute Task Force on Graduation, Completion, and Dropout Indicators (2004) and as a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn (2003).

  For the past eight years he has served as Director of the UC LMRI, a University of California systemwide research unit charged with promoting research on California's large and increasing linguistic minority population. In his role as Director, Rumberger coordinates UC LMRI's $200,000 annual research program, serves as editor-in-chief of the Institute's quarterly newsletter, which is distributed to a mailing list of 3,500 researchers, educators, and policymakers, and oversees the development of UC LMRI's website, which now attracts more than 30,000 unique visitors per month.

 

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