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Dr. Lisa Delpit
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Dr. Lisa Delpit, Executive
Director for the Center for Urban Education & Innovation,
received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Education
in 1993 from Harvard Graduate School
of Education, which hailed her as a “visionary scholar
and woman of courage.” Her work on school-community
relations and cross-cultural communication was cited when
she received her MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
Most recently, Delpit has been selected as the Antioch College
Horace Mann Humanity
Award recipient for 2003, which recognizes a contribution
by alumni of Antioch College who have "won some victory
for humanity." She describes her strongest focus
as "finding
ways and means to best educate urban students, particularly
African-American, and other students of color." Among
her publications are Other People’s Children: Cultural
Conflict in the Classroom (1995); The Real Ebonics
Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American
Children (co-edited with Theresa Perry, 1998); and The
Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in
the
Classroom (co-edited with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, 2002).
Dr. Bob Moses
 In the 1960's Dr. Bob Moses, Eminent Scholar at the Center for Urban Education & Innovation, left his comfortable job at a New York private school to become the field director of Mississippi 's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. On one of the Civil Rights Movement's bloodiest battlegrounds, he led thousands of activists in a door-to-door campaign to register black sharecroppers. Twenty years after becoming the driving force in the liberation of the Mississippi Delta, Moses came back to teach math, something totally different from political activism, yet very much the same. As he details in his book Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights , mastery of math is just as important in the fight against oppression as the right to vote: “If you want to be a citizen of this country... you have to know math. Technology today brings math on equal footing with reading and writing.” To raise achievement in math, Moses developed The Algebra Project, an organization of more than 300 teachers across the country that serves 10,000 students. The Project Curriculum makes math accessible by basing it on “physical events” that students translate into conversational “people talk” and finally mathematical expressions.
Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III
 Dr. Asa. G. Hilliard III, the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, is a psychologist and historian as well as an educator. He encourages teachers to produce “the highest level of academic excellence with those students who are regarded as the most likely candidates for failure.” In more than 40 years of work in public schools and universities, he has earned the distinction of being among the top 30 “movers and shakers” in early childhood education. He has written countless technical papers, articles, and books on testing, teaching strategies, public policy, and cultural styles. Recently, he co-authored a book of particular interest to teachers in urban schools, Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students. Dr. Hilliard is also an authority on African culture and history. He is one of the founding members of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and helped develop a popular educational television series called Free Your Mind, Return to the Source: African Origins.
Dr. Pedro Noguera
 Dr. Pedro Noguera, Director of the Center for Research on Urban Schools at New York University , studies the ways social and economic forces affect urban schools. Noguera, who occasionally pulls double-duty as a public school teacher, is especially interested in detracking, desegregation, multicultural education, and youth violence intervention. He encourages teachers serving marginalized children to constantly engage their classes to find out why they're struggling. He encourages teachers to get to know each student “as a whole,” and to then critically “reflect” on whether their instructional approaches are really working. Noguera has served as the chair of the Berkley School Board and a member of the U.S. Public Health Service Centers for Control Taskforce on Youth Violence. Among his many publications are: The Imperatives of Power: Political Change and the Social Basis of Regime Support in Grenada (1997); “Confronting the Urban in Urban Education”(1996); “Charismatic Leadership and Support”(1996); “Preventing Violence in Schools”(1995); “Transforming Urban Schools through Investments in the Social Capital of Parents”(1999); “Developing Systems to Drive Student Success”(1999); and “When Parents Want Out”(2000).
Dr. Theresa Perry
 Dr. Theresa Perry, Vice President for Community Relations at Wheelock College, focuses much of her research on black student achievement and culturally responsive practices. She argues that even in the supposedly tolerant world of academia, white teachers view black students as second-class learners, a major obstacle to their academic growth. To remedy the problem, schools need to provide black students with “a counternarrative about themselves” in which they’re portrayed as competent learners. Teachers should reconnect black students to a proud educational tradition that traces its roots to Emancipation, when the credo was “freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom.” Implicated too is the debate on Ebonics, which white conservatives relegate to the status of “slang,” but which Perry considers a “rule-based, systematic language” rich with poetic possibilities that black children should celebrate as they learn standard English. Among Dr. Perry’s publications are Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom (co-editor, 1993); and Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African American Students (co-author, 2003). Dr. Perry also specializes in college/school partnerships.
Dr. Charles Payne
 Dr. Charles Payne, the Sally Dalton Professor and director of African-American Studies at Duke University , argues that in order to turn around failing urban schools, policy makers should focus more of their energies not on children, but on the adults running the schools. He believes chronic failure demoralizes teachers and administrators who, much like an athletic team accustomed to losing games, lose the will to demand excellence and fight through adversity. He advocates using facilitators and powerful principals who can “re-teach adults to cooperate.” Payne is also an expert on the Civil Rights Movement, social change and social inequality. Among his publications are the award-winning I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Movement (1995); Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1998); and Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education (1984).
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