CUNY-NYSIEB Advisory Board

Maria T. Andreotti is principal of Medford Elementary School in Suffolk County, NY. Before coming to Medford, Maria served as the K-12 Director of English and Reading in both the Riverhead Central School District and the Miller Place Union Free School District. She began her career in education 21 years ago as a teacher of English Literature at the Middle School/High School levels in NYC after completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Brooklyn College. She presented on her work with the CUNY-NYSIEB project at the 2013 NYSABE conference. As an English language learner herself, she has devoted her career to assisting emergent bilingual students in being academically successful. Ms. Andreotti is proud to be a member of the CUNY-NYSIEB advisory board.

Diane August, Ph.D., is a Managing Director affiliated with the American Institutes for Research and a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, both located in Washington DC. Her area of expertise is the development of science and literacy in second-language learners. She is the Principal Investigator for a large NICHD-funded study investigating the development of literacy in English-language learners and Co-Principal Investigator at the IES-funded National Research and Development Center on English language Learners. At the Center she has she has conducted a series of experimental studies focused on developing science knowledge and skills in middle grade ELLs. She was Staff Director for the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth. She has been a Senior Program Officer at the National Academy of Sciences where she was study director for the Committee on Developing a Research Agenda on the Education of Limited English Proficient and Bilingual Students. Dr. August has worked as a teacher, school administrator, legislative assistant, Grants Officer for the Carnegie Corporation, and Director of Education for the Children’s Defense Fund. In 1981, she received her Ph.D. in education from Stanford University, and in 1982 completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology also at Stanford. She has published widely in journals and books.

Jim Cummins received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Alberta in the area of educational psychology. He is currently a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research has focused on the nature of language proficiency and second language acquisition with particular emphasis on the social and educational barriers that limit academic success for culturally diverse students. He has served as a consultant on language planning in education to numerous international agencies. His publications include: Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, 1984); Bilingualism in Education: Aspects of Theory, Research and Practice (with Merrill Swain; Longman, 1986); Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle (with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas; Multilingual Matters, 1988); Empowering Minority Students (California Association for Bilingual Education, 1989); Heritage Languages: The Development and Denial of Canada’s Linguistic Resources (with Marcel Danesi; Our Schools, Our Selves, 1990). A volume that analyzes the educational implications of the Internet was published in September 1995: Brave New Schools: Challenging Cultural Illiteracy through Global Learning Networks (with Dennis Sayers; St. Martin’s Press). In May 1996, The California Association for Bilingual Education published Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Diverse Society which focuses on strategies for promoting academic development among culturally diverse students. A second edition of this book will appear in early 2001. In 1997, he co-edited (with David Corson) a volume on Bilingual Education as part of the Kluwer Encyclopedia on Language and Education. In October 2000, Multilingual Matters published his book Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Cummins is also an author of ScottForesman ESL: Accelerating English Language Learning a Grade 1-8 ESL program published in 1996 (other authors are Anna Uhl Chamot, Carolyn Kessler, J. Michael O’Malley, and Lily Wong Fillmore). He is also an author of the Scott Foresman Spanish reading program, Lectura, and has contributed to Scott Foresman Science and Reading programs. In the area of test development he is an author of the Bilingual Verbal Abilities Test (with Ana Muñoz-Sandoval, Criselda Alvarado, and Mary Ruef; Riverside Publishers). In May 1997, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the Bank Street College of Education in New York City. In October, 2000, his 1986 paper “Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention” was chosen by the Harvard Educational Review (HER) to appear in the HER Classics Series.

Serapha Cruz is Principal and co-founder of The Bronx School of Young Leaders/MS 331 in New York City. She has been a supervisor at the middle school for ten years. Before working at MS 331 she taught elementary school for eight years in Washington Heights, NYC and for one year at an arts middle school in New Orleans, LA. She graduated from the University of Colorado with a History Degree, received a Master’s Degree in Education from City College, and received a second Master’s Degree in Education Supervision from Fordham University. Her list of accomplishments includes speaking at the National Middle School Association annual conference in 2010 and a publication in Middle Ground magazine in 2011.

Dr. Candido DeJesus is currently the Director of the Bilingual/ESL Teacher Leader Academy BETLA) at the Bank Street College of Education where he has been implementing a NYSED grant that trains outstanding Bilingual and ESL teachers. The BETLA program develops their leadership capacity to achieve sustainable school improvement to reduce the achievement gap at schools with English Language Learners. He has also been instrumental in the training of assistant principal candidates in his former school district and in the prestigious Principals Institute at Bank Street College. As a consultant, he did Quality Reviews of NYC schools at all levels. His doctorate is in the Professional Development of School Building Leaders. Candido retired in 2005 from the NYC Department of Education after 33 years. He spent 10 years as one of the first Bilingual teachers in the public schools. In addition, he spent 20 years as a very successful principal on 3 different levels. One of his greatest achievements was keeping an elementary school off the NYS SUR list. Another was guiding a struggling middle school to come off the NYS Corrective Action List for which he received performance monies. His passion is training school leaders and teachers on the most effective strategies for team-building and accelerating the achievement of English language learners.

Dr. Bert Flugman has been director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Education (CASE) in the Educational Psychology program at the Graduate Center for over 25 years. In that time, he has been involved with basic and applied research aimed at improving and upgrading the quality of education in urban areas. His specific areas of expertise include: Career development, organizational change in schools, and special education. CASE conducts basic and applied research concerned with improving and upgrading the quality of education in urban areas. CASE serves as a forum for consideration of policy issues, as a center for interdisciplinary approaches to educational problems, and as a clearinghouse in areas of educational research. CASE draws its researchers from among the faculty of the colleges of the City University of New York, as well as from students and faculty of the Graduate School, and maintains a close affiliation with the Graduate School’s Ph.D. Program in Educational Psychology.

Rebecca Freeman Field, Ph.D., is a sociolinguist and language educator dedicated to the professional development of educators who work with language learners. She is adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Director of the Language Education Division of Caslon Publishing and Consulting. Freeman Field advises teachers and administrators in the United States and internationally on English as a second language, bilingual education, and world language policies, program development, implementation, and evaluation. She is author of Bilingual Education and Social Change, Building on Community Bilingualism, and co-editor (with Else Hamayan) of English Language Learners at School: A Guide for Administrators.

Danling Fu, Ph.D, is a Professor of Language and Culture, in the School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education in the University of Florida. She receives her BA in linguistics and MA in English literature and her doctoral in Reading and Writing Instruction. She teaches courses for both undergraduate and graduate students addressing the topics on teaching methods, composition theory/research, writing development and assessment, and literacy/language /culture. She researches and provides inservice and consultancy to public schools nationally, with a special focus on writing instruction and literacy instruction for English language learners. For a decade, she worked in New York City schools with a high percentage of new immigrant student population and low graduation rate. She serves on ELL Advisory Board of Pearson Publishers, and works with policy makers in Washington, DC on issues related to new immigrant students. Her publication includes three books My Trouble is My English, An Island of English and Writing between Languages and over 60 journal articles, book chapters and book reviews addressing teaching English language learners and children’s writing development. Her recent research focuses on cultural tradition and writing instruction and its impact on bilingual writers.

Patricia Gándara is Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA where she is Co-Director of of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. She has been a Commissioner for Postsecondary Education for the state of California, director of education research in the California legislature, a bilingual psychologist, and a social scientist with the RAND Corporation. Professor Gándara’s research focuses on language policy, access to equitable education for underrepresented students, and the education of Latino youth. Between 2010-2011 she was deeply involved in coordinating a research strategy for Horne v Flores, the Supreme Court case that limits the rights of English learners to an equitable education, and she has recently compled a study for the Ford Foundation on Latinos and African Americans and community colleges that serve them well. Her current research is on building on the assets of immigrant students. She was recently named an AERA 2011 Fellow by the American Educational Research Association. Among her recent publications are

Gándara, P.. & Orfield, G., 2012. Why Arizona matters: the historical, legal, and politicalcontexts of Arizona’s instructional policies and U.S.linguistic hegemony, Language Policy, forthcoming

Gándara, P., 2011, High Stakes and Low Horizons: Changing the Odds for Latino Students, The NEA Almanac of Higher Education, 2011

Gándara, P., 2010, Latino Students and the Curse of Triple Segregation, Educational Leadership, November, 2010.

Gándara, P. & M. Hopkins, 2010. (Eds.). Forbidden Language. English Learners and Restrictive Language Policies. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gándara, P. & F. Contreras, 2009. The Latino Education Crisis. The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Gándara, P. & Rumberger, R., 2009. Immigration, Language, and Education: How Does Language Policy Structure Opportunity? Teachers College Record.

Dr. Eugene García is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Professor and Vice President for Education Partnerships at ASU from 2006-2011 and as Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education from 2002-2006. He joined ASU from the University of California, Berkeley where he was Professor and Dean of The Graduate School of Education (1995-2001). He has served as an elected member of a local school board and a Senior Officer in the US Department of Education. He has published extensively in areas of early learning, bilingual development and equal educational opportunity. His most recent books include Teaching and Learning in Two Languages (2005); Early Education of Dual Language Learners (2010), edited with E. Frede, and, Cognition, Bilingualism and Education (2011) with José Náñez.

Luis O. Reyes is a Research Associate at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies/Centro De Estudios Puertorriqueños of Hunter College, CUNY. He served as Assistant Professor in the Middle and High School Department at Lehman College, CUNY, in Fall 2008 and as a Visiting Fellow in the Bronx Institute at Lehman College, CUNY, from 2004 to 2008. Previously he held teaching appointments as Assistant Professor at Hunter College, Brooklyn College and Baruch College, CUNY, and at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. He has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences in Education from Stanford University in California, and an M.A. in Spanish Literature from Middlebury College in Vermont. His publications include a peer-reviewed article in the Harvard Educational Review (October, 2006), on the New York City Aspira Consent Decree that established the right for Puerto Rican/Latino students in New York City to receive bilingual education instruction along with the basic components of the bilingual education model.  He has published other scholarly articles on bilingual policy and professional development models in the Journal of Latinos and Education (2003) and the Bilingual Research Journal (2002). Between 1990 and 1998, Dr. Reyes served as a Member of the New York City Board of Education. He chaired the Board’s Latino Commission on Educational Reform which produced three reports under his leadership. He was Deputy Director for Research and Advocacy at Aspira of New York, a youth leadership organization serving Puerto Rican and Latino youth, between 1982 and 1990. From 2003 to 2009 he was the Coordinator of the Coalition for Educational Excellence for English Language Learners (CEEELL) based in New York City.

Dr. Elana Shohamy is a Professor and Chair of the Language Education program at the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University. She researches and writes about multiple issues related language policies, ideologies and practice in multilingual societies, especially in Israel. Her more recent studies focuses on: Language attitudes of Arabs and Jews; spoken Arabic and language attitudes, languages representation in public space (linguistic landscape), Academic achievement of immigrant in schools, language tests as language policies, and various issues related to language rights such as language citizenship tests. Her recent books include: The Languages of Israel: Policy Ideology and Practice (with Bernard Spolsky, 1999; Multilingual Matters); The Power of Tests (2001, Longman/Pearson) and Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches (2006, Routledge). She is currently the editor of the journal Language Policy.

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. Working in the area of applied linguistics, much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. Dr. Valdés has investigated Latino students in elementary, middle school, high school and college leading to six books and more than 70 articles. Her book Con respeto: Bridging the distance between culturally diverse families and schools (Teachers College Press, 1996) examines the lives of K-3 English-language learners and their families. The book Learning and not Learning English (Teachers College Press, 2001) follows four middle-school students over a two-year period. Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Lawrence Erlbaum,2003) focuses on high school students who serve as young interpreters for their parents, and her last book Developing minority language resources: The case of Spanish in California (Valdés, Fishman, Chavez & Perez, Multilingual Matters, 2006) examines Spanish language maintenance and instruction in both secondary and postsecondary institutions. Her book Bilingualism and Testing: A Special Case of Bias (Ablex Publishing Co.,1994) is seen as a timely classic that explores the growing challenge of increased use of standardized tests. Her most recent book, Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey (Teachers College Press) appeared in November, 2010. She is currently completing a manuscript of a new book, titled: Curricularizing Language.Valdés has carried out extensive work on maintaining and preserving heritage languages among minority populations since the 1970’s. Her early publications in this area include an edited volume of articles entitled: Teaching Spanish to the Hispanic Bilingual: Issues, Aims and Methods. (Valdés, Lozano, and García-Moya, eds. Teachers College Press, 1981). In the last several years, her work includes the book on Spanish in California referred to above as well as a number of articles including: “Toward an ecological vision of languages for all: The case of heritage languages” in A. Heining-Boynton, Realizing our vision of languages for all (Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006); and “Bilingualism, heritage learners and SLA research: Opportunities lost or seized” (Modern Language Journal,2005). Valdés is also the co-author of a best-selling Spanish language textbook that focuses on the teaching of Spanish to Hispanic bilinguals. Español Escrito (first published by Scribners in 1978 and now published by Prentice Hall) is now in its sixth edition. She was awarded the Joshua Fishman Award for Outstanding Contributions and Leadership in the Heritage Language Field from the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA in 2010.

Valdés is a member of the American Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and a member of the Board of Trustees of Educational Testing Service (ETS). She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Review of Educational Research, Bilingual Review, Written Communication, Modern Language Journal, and Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences. In May 2000, Valdés received an honorary doctorate from the University of Arizona for her work on the use of Spanish in the United States.

Nancy Villarreal de Adler assumed the position of NYSABE’s Executive Director on September 1, 2008. In 2004, Nancy retired after 34 years of service in the field of Education. Prior to her retirement, Nancy served as the Director of the Office of Bilingual Special Education Services-Citywide Programs, New York City Board of Education. Her administrative experiences also include: Director of Magnet School Programs, District One; Director of the Bilingual Multicultural Institute, and Director of the Office of Bilingual Special Education Funded Programs, New York City Board of Education.

Nancy initiated her teaching career in Syracuse, NY, as an ESL teacher. As the Syracuse School District developed its Bilingual Education Program in 1972, Nancy became the first bilingual teacher in central NY. With the growth of the program, Nancy became a staff developer, curriculum specialist, and coordinator. When she married Jack Adler and moved to New York City in 1985, Nancy re-initiated her career as a bilingual teacher and Bilingual/ESL staff developer. Later on, she joined the Division of Special Education, New York City Board of Education as Coordinator of Title VII projects for Special Education. A native of Peru, Nancy is a proud graduate of the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional de Mujeres-Monterrico, Lima, Peru (formerly known as Escuela Normal de Mujeres “San Pedro”). It was here where Nancy forged her vision and a solid sense of mission as an educator. Thanks to the guidance and support of her parents, dedicated teachers, friends, and classmates, Nancy’s clear notions of equitable education, social responsibility, and justice laid the foundation for her advocacy work on behalf of the educational rights of emergent bilingual learners in the USA and in Peru.

Thanks to scholarships and Fulbright fellowships, Nancy was able to come to the USA to pursue post graduate studies at Syracuse University and St. John’s University. In addition, she had the opportunity to participate in numerous institutes and professional development programs such as the Harvard University Summer program on Multiple Intelligences and the Institute for Educational Leadership.

Nancy’s commitment to education can be summarized in her own words: “I dare to envision a world where the educational rights of all children, without distinction, are respected and cherished as the most precious treasures of all nations.”