Robert Fairlie

I am a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UCLA, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). I study a wide range of topics including entrepreneurship, education, labor, racial, gender and caste inequality, information technology, immigration, health, and development. I strive for my research to have a broad impact by providing rigorous, unbiased and objective evidence on questions that are important for society and often involve highly-charged policy debates. My methodological focus is on conducting randomized control field experiments, employing advanced econometric techniques and identification strategies, and working with and building large administrative datasets. Publications from my research have appeared in leading journals in economics, policy, management, science, and medicine.

 

I received a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. with honors from Stanford University. I have held visiting positions at Stanford University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, and Australian National University. I have received funding for my research from the National Science Foundation, National Academies and Russell Sage Foundation as well as numerous government agencies and foundations, and have testified in front of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly. Recent awards and honors include a joint resolution from the California State Assembly, Choice Academic Title award, and the Bradford-Osborne research award in both 2020 and 2021. I am regularly interviewed by the media to comment on economic, education, entrepreneurship, inequality and policy issues.

 

 

 

My new book on entrepreneurship, job creation and survival just came out at MIT Press.

 

 

 

 

For more information on my research, teaching, and policy work, please visit: https://rfairlie.sites.ucsc.edu/

 

Sawyer Hogenkamp

Sawyer completed an M.Ed. in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University. He also holds a M.Ed. and B.Ed. from Queen’s University, and B.A. from University of Waterloo, majoring in Music, and Human Geography & Environmental Management. He is pursuing a PhD to further the study of relational youth violence and school climate to encompass under-supervised contexts within and outside of school grounds, such as in neighborhoods, virtual spaces, or on school buses. He serves as a consultant with an organization in Canada that trains school bus drivers on bullying prevention and mental health awareness. He’s also engaged in supporting social emotional learning in underserved populations domestically (urban and rural America), and abroad (urban and rural China). Research skills include both qualitative and quantitative analysis as well as mixed methods, having participated with interdisciplinary research groups collaborating with Canadian Federal and Provincial Government Agencies, Universities, and private organizations. Currently Sawyer is working with the APA Taskforce on Violence Against Educators, organizing and analyzing data and policy of qualitative data from school psychologists, social workers, counselors, administrators, teachers, and school staff.

Emily Weisburst

I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. My research focuses on topics in labor economics and public finance, including criminal justice and education.

I recently earned my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. While in graduate school, I worked as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President and as a research associate for the RAND Corporation on joint projects with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. I have also received the NAED Spencer Dissertation Fellowship to support my research on the impact of funding for police in public schools on student disciplinary outcomes and educational attainment in Texas.

My research interests include understanding factors that impact police decision-making and public trust in police. I am also interested in how interactions with the criminal justice system affect individuals, families and communities. A recent paper examines how much police discretion matters to law enforcement outcomes, after accounting for offense context. In this project, I find that the likelihood that an incident results in an arrest critically depends on the officer that shows up to respond to an offense reported through a police call for service.

For more information about my work, check out my website: emilyweisburst.com

Natalie Bau

Natalie Bau is an assistant professor of economics and public policy at UCLA. She is an economist studying topics in development and education economics and is particularly interested in the industrial organization of educational markets. She has studied private schooling and teacher compensation in Pakistan, the relationship between negotiation skills and girls’ educational outcomes in Zambia, and the interactions between educational investment and cultural traditions in Indonesia, Zambia, and Ghana.

Dr. Bau received her PhD in public policy from Harvard University, and is currently an affiliate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Centre for Economic Policy and Research.  Prior to joining UCLA, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto.

Personal Academic Website.

Meredith Phillips

Phillips studies the causes and consequences of educational inequality. She specializes in the causes of ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in educational success and how to reduce those disparities. Her current research projects focus on promising school-based practices for improving students’ academic achievement; the impact of math course-taking on students’ academic achievement and educational attainment; the correlates of summer melt; and survey methods involving children and adolescents.

Phillips co-founded EdBoost, a charitable, educational non-profit whose mission is to reduce educational inequality by making high-quality supplemental educational services accessible to children from all family backgrounds. EdBoost develops and refines interventions and curriculum at its learning center, implements interventions in educational settings, and then tests promising interventions using rigorous evaluations. Phillips also co-founded the Los Angeles Education Research Institute (LAERI), a Los Angeles-based research-practice partnership that collaborates with L.A. Unified.

Phillips served on the National Academy Committee on Developing Indicators of Educational Equity and the National Academy Committee on the Evaluation Framework for Successful K-12 STEM Education. She is a past recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, as well as the dissertation award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her A.B. from Brown University.

Google Scholar Citations

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Does Virtual Advising Increase College Enrollment? Evidence from a Random-Assignment College Access Field Experiment
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Sarah Reber

Using Research to Improve College Readiness: A Research Partnership between the Los Angeles Unified School District and and the Los Angeles Education Research Institute
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Kyo Yamashiro, Adina Farrukh, Cynthia Lim, Katherine Hayes, Nicole Wagner, Hansheng Chen

Parenting, Time Use, and Disparities in Academic Outcomes
Author: Phillips, Meredith

Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Academic Skills: Their Origins and Consequences
Author: Phillips, Meredith

Culture and Stalled Progress in Narrowing the Black-White Test Score Gap
Author: Phillips, Meredith

How Did the Statewide Assessment and Accountability Policies of the 1990s Affect Instructional Quality in Low-Income Elementary Schools?
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Jennifer Flashman

Social Reproduction and Child-rearing Practices:  Social Class, Children’s Agency, and the Summer Activity Gap in Low-Income Elementary Schools
Author: Chin, Tiffani, Meredith Phillips

School Inequality:  What Do We Know?
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Tiffani Chin

The Black-White Test Score Gap
Editor: Jencks, Christopher, Meredith Phillips

SELECTED REPORTS

College Going in LAUSD: An Analysis of College Enrollment, Persistence, and Completion Patterns
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Kyo Yamashiro, Thomas A. Jacobson

College Readiness Supports in LAUSD High Schools: A First Look
Author: Phillips, Meredith, Kyo Yamashiro, Carrie E. Miller

Gary Orfield

Gary Orfield is Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests are in the study of civil rights, education policy, urban policy, and minority opportunity.

He was co-founder and director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, and now serves as co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA.

His central interest has been the development and implementation of social policy, particularly the impact of policy on equal opportunity for success in American society.

Orfield is a member of the National Academy of Education and has received numerous awards, including the Teachers College Medal, Social Justice Award of the AERA, the American Political Science Association Charles Merriam Award for his “contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research,” and honorary PhDs.

Orfield’s research includes 12 co-authored or co-edited books since 2004 and scores of articles and reports. In addition to scholarly work, he has served as expert witness or special master in more than three dozen class action civil rights cases, on school desegregation, housing discrimination and other issues, and as consultant to many school districts, federal, state and local governments, civil rights and teachers organizations. He and various collaborators have organized amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on the major school and affirmative action decisions over the last two decades.

Published books include:

  • The Walls Around College Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, (forthcoming 2022).
  • Accountability and Opportunity in Higher Education, ed. (with N. Hillman), Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2018.
  • Discrimination in Elite Public Schools: Investigating Buffalo, ed. (with J. Ayscue), New York: Teachers College Press, 2018.
  • Educational Delusions? Why Choice can Deepen Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair (with E. Frankenberg)Berkeley: University of California Press (2013)
  • The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education (with E. Frankenberg), Cambridge: Harvard Education Press (2012)
  • Lessons In Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in America’s Public Schools (with E. Frankenberg), Charlottesville: UVA Press (2008)
  • Twenty-First Century Color Lines (with Andrew Grant-Thomas), Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2009)
  • Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education (with P. Gandara and C. Horn), Albany: SUNY Press (2006)
  • Latino Educational Opportunity: New Directions for Community Colleges, 133 (2) (with C. Horn and S. Flores), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley (2006)
  • School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? (with John Boger), Chapel Hill: UNC Press (2005)
  • Higher Education and the Color Line (with P. Marin and C. Horn), Cambridge: Harvard Education Press (2005)
  • Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis, Cambridge: Harvard Education Press (2004)
  • Religion Race and Justice in a Changing America, ed. (with H. Lebowitz), Century Foundation Press, 1999
  • Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New Press, 1996
  • The Closing Door: Conservative Policy and Black Opportunity (with C. Ashkinaze), Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991
  • Must We Bus? Segregated Schools and National Policy, Brookings Insitute, 1978.
  • Congressional Power: Congress and Social Change, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Archie Kleingartner

Dr. Kleingartner is Professor of Policy Studies and Management and the Founding Dean of the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. He has been on the faculty of UCLA since 1964. He chaired the committee that recommended and designed the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research and served as Dean during its first two years (1994 -1996). From 1997 – 1999 Dr. Kleingartner served as Chair of the UCLA Academic Information Technology Board (AITB), which set policy in the areas of computing and digital technology.

From 1975 to 1983, Professor Kleingartner served the nine-campus University of California System as Vice President for Academic and Staff Personnel Relations. During that period, he had responsibility for the human resources function for a workforce in excess of 100,000 faculty, management and staff. He was responsible for personnel policies, affirmative action programs, collective bargaining and employee relations, compensations and salary administration, training and development, the UC retirement system, employee benefits, faculty housing, conflict of interest, and information practices.

Professor Kleingartner founded the Human Resources Round Table (HARRT) at UCLA, a membership organization, in 1986. HARRT’s primary objective is to enhance the practice and teaching of management by fostering close ties between academic and human resources executives.

He is the creator and co-executive producer of a major CD-ROM and World Wide Web project entitled Global Windows: The Guide to Business Success — Japan (1997). The site is an authoritative guide for conducting business with the Japanese. A second website, Global Window: The Guide to Business Success – China s in development and scheduled to go online in 2002

Dr. Kleingartner’s publications have dealt with such topics as international human resources management, higher education, employee relations, management of creative professionals, cultural policy, and multimedia education in professional development.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Flexible Production and the Transformation of Industrial Relations in the Motion Picture and Television Industry
Kleingartner, A. and Paul, A.  Industrial and Labor Relations Review 47, no. 4 (1994): 663-678.

Human Resource Management in High Technology
Kleingartner, A. and Anderson, C. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987.

Human Resource Management in High Technology
Kleingartner, A. and Anderson, C. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987.

Charles E. Young

Charles E. Young took office as chancellor of UCLA on Sept. 1, 1968, and was formally inaugurated on May 23, 1969 — the 50th anniversary of the university’s founding. His inaugural pledge was to advance UCLA “from the second level of good universities to the first rank of excellent universities.” Today, UCLA is in the distinguished company of the finest universities in the nation and the world.

When he became chancellor at the age of 36, Dr. Young was the youngest person at the helm of any major American university. After nearly 29 years in office, he was the senior chief executive by tenure among his fellow chancellors and presidents nationwide. Chancellor Young retired on June 30, 1997.

Dr. Young presided over a complex organization that is one of the largest employers in Southern California and had an operating budget approaching $2 billion. He directed the rapid growth of UCLA — which educates more students than any other California college, public or private — toward its present distinction as one of the country’s most comprehensive and dynamic university campuses.

UCLA is widely recognized to be among the top 10 research universities in the nation; established in 1919, it is also the youngest of this select group. Few institutions can match UCLA’s comprehensiveness. In 1995, the National Research Council ranked 31 UCLA Ph.D. programs among the top 20 in their respective fields — third-best in the nation.

In the first months of Dr. Young’s chancellorship, UCLA had only one endowed professorship, library holdings of fewer than three million volumes, an ethnic minority enrollment of less than 23 percent, and an operating budget of $170 million. The campus today boasts more than 120 endowed faculty chairs, 6.7 million volumes in the UCLA Library, an ethnic minority enrollment of nearly 60 percent, and operating expenses approaching $2 billion. Extramural funding for the research program has skyrocketed during Chancellor Young’s tenure, from $66.4 million in 1968-’69 to a campus-record $406 million in 1995-’96. The private fund-raising program has likewise flourished, from $6.1 million raised in 1968-’69 to $190.8 million in 1995-’96 — a University of California record. UCLA’s endowment, which had a market value of $19 million on June 30, 1969, is presently valued at $752 million. By each of these measures, UCLA ranks among America’s premier universities.

Dr. Young’s association with the University of California dates to 1953, when he enrolled as a transfer student at UC Riverside. There, he served as the new campus’s first student body president. After graduating with honors in 1955, he pursued doctoral studies in political science at UCLA, earning his M.A. in 1957 and Ph.D. in 1960. In 1959, as a member of UC President Clark Kerr’s staff, he participated in the creation of the Master Plan for Higher Education in California and the University Growth Plan.

Dr. Young returned to UCLA in 1960 to serve in a series of executive posts in the administration of Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy: assistant to the chancellor (1960-62), assistant chancellor (1962-63), and vice chancellor for administration (1963-68). He also became a full professor in the political science department, an appointment he still holds. Following Chancellor Murphy’s resignation, Dr. Young was named his successor by the UC Regents on July 12, 1968.

Chancellor Young was recognized nationally and internationally for his leadership in higher education. He was chairman of the Association of American Universities. He served on numerous task forces and commissions of the American Council on Education, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and the Business-Higher Education Forum.

Committed to making internationalism and inclusiveness hallmarks of UCLA, Chancellor Young was an ardent spokesman on behalf of educational opportunity, inclusiveness and the value of ethnic and cultural diversity to the university experience. He served on the administrative board of the International Association of Universities and the National Committee on United States-China Relations, Inc., and chaired the board of governors of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation. In 1985, he received the Award for Inter-American University Cooperation from the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education. The chancellor and his wife, Sue K. Young, were jointly awarded the UCLA International Student Center’s 1987 Neil H. Jacoby International Award for their outstanding contributions to international education. In January 1997, the Coalition for International Education honored Dr. Young with its first International Education Leadership Award, in recognition of his contributions to the development of international studies at UCLA and other American universities.

Chancellor Young made UCLA an integral part of, and partner with, the Los Angeles region, reinforcing the importance of the university’s mission in service to the community. His commitment to public service was reflected in his leadership role in California Campus Compact, an organization he co-chaired that is part of a national coalition of colleges and universities striving to encourage student involvement in community and public service. Dr. Young also was active in efforts to improve elementary and secondary education; he serves on the Council of Trustees of LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now), a coalition of leaders working to reform K-12 education.

A longtime member of the NCAA Presidents Commission, Chancellor Young often drew the national spotlight as a leading proponent of intercollegiate athletics reform. He was active in the movement to raise academic eligibility standards for student-athletes and curb recruiting abuses.

Chancellor Young is a respected adviser to numerous enterprises in the realms of business, education, the arts, and science and technology. He has served on a number of corporate boards in the finance, technology, and health-care industries and is currently a director of Intel Corp. and Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management. He is a member of the board of directors of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, and Town Hall of California. He participates in several organizations that examine the role of science and technology in society, and the research agenda for universities. These include the Carnegie Commission Task Force on Science and Technology and the States, the National Academy of Sciences’ Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, and the Board of Governors of the Foundation for International Exchange of Scientific and Cultural Information by Telecommunications.

Chancellor Young has been honored many times for his contributions to academe and community endeavors. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, cited for his “outstanding and recognized accomplishments in educational and scientific administration.” In May 1996 he was among a select group of leaders in education, community affairs, the arts and culture, and communications recognized by the Central City Association as a “Treasure of Los Angeles.” The Hugh O’Brien Youth Foundation bestowed its prestigious Albert Schweitzer Leadership Award upon him in December 1996.

Dr. Young has received several tributes from the UCLA Alumni Association, including its highest honor, the Edward A. Dickson Alumnus of the Year Award, which was presented in May 1994 in recognition of his 25th anniversary as chancellor. The UC Riverside Alumni Association gave him its 1996 Distinguished Service Award, honoring his contributions to higher education and his tenure as UCLA chancellor. Also in 1996, Chancellor Charles and Sue Young were named Honorary Fellows of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science.