I joined the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies faculty as an assistant professor in January of 2001. Driven by a passion to encourage poor and minority youth to view themselves as lifelong learners, my research interests centers upon increasing the college matriculation rates of these students through rigorous research pursuits and exploring avenues that ensure their graduation from higher education institutions. The challenge to obtaining this goal is that many schools in this country remain separate and unequal despite judicial mandates and the good intentions of equity-minded educators. However, my endeavors are conceptually and analytically linked to my interests in public policy and in identifying effective strategies and practices that lead to both excellence and equity in urban schools serving large numbers of educationally disadvantaged students.

As a product of the public school system in a working class, racially mixed community, I encountered many obstacles towards the pursuit of my own educational goals. It became increasingly clear to me, however, that many of these challenges occurred (and are occurring) to students with whom I shared a similar background and life experience. Moreover, I soon realized that the obstacles that we faced concerning academic pursuits have little to do with individual cognitive abilities or intellectual curiosity, but are the results of systemic problems that require systemic solutions. This realization served as the impetus for my professional aspirations.

In the search for systemic solutions to the problems of education, I focused my attention as an undergraduate on political science and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government from Pomona College. While obtaining a better understanding of the political processes that shape and govern public education, my attention began to shift to the area of public policy. As a Sloan Public Policy Fellow at Brandeis University, I completed a Master of Arts degree in Management and combined my training as a CORO Public Affairs Fellow, from the previous year, with a study that focused on how public policy influences and shapes social institutions such as schools. Frustrated by the lack of progress that was being made by the macro-level policies at the federal level, I decided to attend the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where I obtained my Doctorate in 1996 and engaged in research that helped me make sense of this outstanding phenomenon.