A member of the National Academy of Education, Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching has spanned early elementary through doctoral education and her research has focused on multicultural education, teacher education, literacy, and the education of students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, with a special emphasis on Latin@ students. The author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters she has also written or edited 13 books, including a memoir, Brooklyn Dreams: My Life in Public Education (Harvard Education Press, 2015), and a co-authored book with her daughter Alicia López, an award-winning middle school ESL teacher, Teaching, a Life’s Work: A Mother-Daughter Dialogue (Teachers College Press, 2019). She is the founding editor of the Language, Culture, and Teaching series (Routledge Publishers) and inaugural editor of the Visions of Practice series (Teachers College Press). The first edition of her classic text, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (1992), was selected for the Museum of Education Readers’ Guide as “one of the 100 books that helped define the field of education in the 20th century.” Dr. Nieto has received dozens of awards for her scholarly work, teaching, activism, and advocacy, including 9 honorary doctorates and, most recently, the 2021 Governor’s Award in the Humanities from Mass Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 2022 Lifelong Educator of the Year Award from NABE, the National Association for Bilingual Education. 

-- National Academy of Education

Elizabeth D. Steiner (she/her) is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation with expertise in education policy, policy analysis, program evaluation, and qualitative methods and analysis. She is also a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty. Steiner's research is focused on ways to improve public education in the United States for teachers and students, reduce racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, and improve equity of educational and life outcomes.

Her work also addresses implementation of public policy—how systems of rules and incentives intended to encourage behavior toward a desired outcome function in practice, and how policies could be improved to promote desired outcomes. These interests intersect in her work at RAND, which is focused on studying implementation of education reforms and policies. Current research topics include K–12 teacher and principal well-being, working conditions, and the diversity of the educator workforce; personalized and competency-based learning; social and emotional learning; teacher and school leader professional development; and educator evaluation systems.

Steiner holds an M.S.P.P.M. in public policy and management from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.

-- RAND

Ashley Woo is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research interests include wealth and income inequality, educational equity, neighborhood and school segregation, teacher recruitment and retention, education curriculum, and standards-based school reform.

Prior to joining Pardee RAND, she worked for KIPP LA Schools, where she taught second grade at a South Los Angeles charter school. In addition, she is a Teach for America alumna, having completed two years of teaching at a Title I elementary school in Miami, Florida. As a former educator, she is experienced in standards-based and data-driven instruction, curriculum design, and tailoring teaching methods to support specific academic and social-emotional student needs.

She has a B.A. in political economy and a minor in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also conducted research on how American educational outcomes compare to those of other wealthy, industrialized nations in terms of both equity and levels of student achievement.

-- RAND