Dialogues on Race and Class

Melvin Hall - Northern Arizona University Professor, Former Member AEA Board of Directors

MELVIN E. HALL, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Psychology at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Hall completed his B.S., and Ph.D., degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in Social Psychology and Educational Psychology respectively; and M.S. in Counseling at Northern Illinois University.

During a forty plus-year professional career in higher education, Dr. Hall has served in four successive appointments, as an academic dean, comprised of positions at Florida Atlantic University, University of California-Irvine, University of Maryland at College Park, and most recently Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, Dr. Hall served as Dean of the College of Education and additionally was the principal investigator on two five-year US Office of Education GEAR UP grants providing dropout prevention programs and services to thousands of middle and high school students throughout Arizona.

Returning to full-time faculty life in 2002, Dr. Hall has melded teaching and scholarship in Educational Psychology with responsibility as co-principal investigator on five-years of National Science Foundation support for the Relevance of Culture in Evaluation Institute. Subsequent to the RCEI grant, Dr. Hall began a continuing appointment as affiliated faculty in the Center for Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at the University of Illinois. As an external reviewer, Dr. Hall has served on numerous review panels and Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation EHR Division including an invited expert panel on the future of evaluation methodology in STEM programs. In 2015, he accepted an appointment as an intermittent expert at NSF and in that, capacity serves as a program officer for the ADVANCE and HBCU UP Programs within the Human Resource Development Division of the EHR Directorate.

For several years, Dr. Hall served on the American Evaluation Association Standing Committee on Diversity, initiating the association’s published statement on the importance of Cultural Competence in the field of Program Evaluation. In 2013, Dr. Hall became an elected member of the American Evaluation Association Board of Directors. In addition, he a member of the Inclusive Excellence Commission of AAC&U and the External Advisory committee for the Collaborative for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL).

Stafford Hood - Founding Director, Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation & Assessment (CREA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Stafford Hood is the Sheila M. Miller Professor of Education and Founding Director of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (http://crea.education.illinois.edu) in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also holds appointments as Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and Educational Psychology. He has also served as the Associate Dean for Research and Research Education in the College of Education and Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Previously he served as Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Psychology in Education in the College of Education at Arizona State University.

Dr. Hood's recent scholarly publications have primarily focused on culturally responsive evaluation, African American evaluators during the Pre-Brown v. Board of Education period, and the importance of culture/cultural context in program evaluation. He has served as a program evaluation and testing consultant to the federal government, state governments, local school districts, universities, and private foundations as well as internationally in New Zealand and Ireland. He was inducted as a 2016 Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, received the American Evaluation Association’s 2015 Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award and in 2014 an honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor in the School of Education Studies at Dublin City University (Dublin Ireland).

Liz Lutz - Executive Director of the Health Collaborative

Ms. Lutz is the Executive Director of The Health Collaborative. She has been with the organization since 2007, serving in multiple roles throughout her tenure. She asserts her passion for community health, equality in service, and collaborative vision to construct sustainable and resilient processes that will directly impact the health status of the community. Ms. Lutz assiduously works in tandem with the Board of Directors and staff to provide the highest standards of collaboration, sharing of resources and best practices to increase the impact of services to the community. Through these strengths, Ms. Lutz has been able to leverage resources to extend the mission of The Health Collaborative into a new caliber of service-oriented initiatives that bring together leaders in the field of community health to promote their joint efforts while fostering a shared vision of prosperity for the citizens of Bexar County, and diminishing duplication of services and the need for competition in the area of community health.

Ms. Lutz background includes over 12 years of business management, administration, and program management, as well as experience in building community infrastructure and partnerships to develop resources for community health improvement.

Celina Moreno - Legislative Attorney, Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF)

A San Antonio native, Celina Moreno is an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. At MALDEF, she has successfully represented DREAMers to defend against a lawsuit to invalidate the Texas DREAM Act, the American GI Forum in a suit to reverse a Whites-only cemetery policy, and over 20 Latino organizations as amicus to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the University of Texas at Austin’s race-conscious admissions plan. Celina served as trial and appellate co-counsel in the challenge against the inequity and inadequacy of the Texas school finance system. She is currently co-counsel in LULAC v. Texas, a lawsuit seeking to improve the quality of education for English learner secondary students. As MALDEF’s legislative attorney, Celina serves as the co-chair for the Senate Hispanic Caucus/Mexican American Legislative Caucus (MALC) Education Task Force and the statewide TRUST Coalition, a group of business, faith, civil rights and law enforcement leaders focused on immigrants’ rights. She also co-coordinates the Texas Election Reform Coalition, a statewide voting rights coalition. Celina previously served as director of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s School-to-Prison Pipeline Project. She received degrees in journalism from UT-Austin, in law from the University of Houston, and in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Rogelio Saenz - Dean of the College of Public Policy and Mark G. Yudof Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio

Rogelio Sáenz is Dean of the College of Public Policy and holds the Mark G. Yudof Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is also a Policy Fellow of the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Sáenz has written extensively in the areas of demography, Latina/os, race and ethnic relations, inequality, immigration, public policy, social justice, and human rights. He is co-author of Latinos in the United States: Diversity and Change (Polity Press) and Latino Issues: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO Press); he is also co-editor of The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity (Springer Press) as well as Latina/os in the United States: Changing the Face of América (Springer Press). Sáenz regularly writes op-ed essays on current demographic, social, racial, economic, and political issues with his contributions appearing in such newspapers as the Austin American-Statesman, El Paso Times, New York Times, Rio Grande Valley Guardian, and the San Antonio Express-News.

Ramon Juan Vasquesz - Executive Director of the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions

Ramon Vasquez was born in San Antonio and is an enrolled member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation. In 1985 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he worked as a gang specialist for Centro De La Comunidad Unida. He specialized in the development and implementation of intervention projects among Latino Street gangs. In 1991, he and his family moved back to San Antonio, where he continued his Gang Intervention work as Director for the Youth in Conflict Program. Ramon was instrumental in the establishment of a 5 year Peace Truce between 6 of San Antonio most notorious street gangs. In 1998, he was appointed and currently serves as Executive Director of the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions. Ramon has spent the last 19 years specifically working on community mobilization and Community/Academic partnerships. Primarily focusing on the mobilization of men and boys color. Currently Ramon serves as the Mayors Appointed Chairman for the Violence Prevention and Recidivism Reduction Committee for My Brother’s Keeper Initiative and the Mayors Police and Community Relations Council. Ramon is also the Co-Founder of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, which conducts research and develops Policy for Federal implementation for American Indian Families.