Presenter Biographies
Barbara T. Bowman, M.A., is one of three faculty founders of Erikson Institute and served as president of the institute from 1994 to 2001. She is the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development at Erikson and is also chief early childhood education officer for the Chicago Public Schools. She is an authority on early education, a national advocate for improved and expanded training for practitioners who teach and care for young children, and a pioneer in building knowledge and understanding of the issues of access and equity for minority children.
Bowman is past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and has served on numerous boards, including the High Scope Educational Foundation, the Institute for Psychoanalysis, Business People in the Public Interest, the Great Books Foundation, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Carol D. Lee, Ph.D., is Professor of Education and Social Policy in the Learning Sciences Program at Northwestern University. She is President of the American Educational Research Association (2009-2010), a member of the National Academy of Education, past President of the National Conference of Research on Language and Literacy, former Vice President of Division G of the American Educational Research Association and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Professor Lee is the author of three books including the most recent Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind and co-editor of Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research, along with numerous other scholarly publications. Her research focuses on ecological influences on learning and development, including the Cultural Modeling Framework for the design of instruction that scaffolds knowledge constructed from youth’s everyday experience to support discipline-specific learning. She is a co-founder of four schools in Chicago, including three charter schools, serving as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Betty Shabazz International Charter Schools.
Stephen Raudenbush, Ed.D., is Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Chairman of the Committee on Education. He received an Ed.D. in Policy Analysis and Evaluation Research in 1984 from Harvard University and was a professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan from 1998 to 2005.
He is a leading scholar on quantitative methods for studying child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods. He is best known for work developing hierarchical linear models, with broad applications in the design and analysis of longitudinal and multilevel research. Raudenbush has been a Scientific Director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, an ambitious study of how family, neighborhood and school settings shape the academic learning, social development, mental health and exposure to violence of children growing up in Chicago. He is currently studying the impact of residential and school mobility on student learning and developing new measures of school and classroom quality. In 2008 he gave the annual Brown Lecture, established to commemorate the anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which banned legally segregated school systems.
Elliot Regenstein, J.D., is a Chicago-based partner of EducationCounsel LLC who focuses on providing legal, policy, strategic planning, and advocacy services to governments, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations. He served as co-chair of the Illinois Early Learning Council from 2004 through April 2009; he is currently a member of the Council’s Executive Committee and chair of its data work group.
Regenstein is currently working on behalf of foundations and nonprofits with a number of states on a variety of education reforms. His projects include expanding early learning and preschool systems, improving B-20 coordination and alignment, implementing best-practice college and career readiness policies, providing expanded dual credit and early college high school opportunities, and developing appropriate interventions and supports for struggling schools. He also advocates for improved early learning opportunities at the federal level.