Nelda Cambron-McCabe
Nelda Cambron-McCabe is a former professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at Miami University (Ohio). As an advisory board member and a facilitator of the National Superintendents Roundtable, she works closely with Roundtable superintendents in planning programs to support them as they pursue educational change in their school systems. At Miami University, she taught courses in school leadership and public school law and is coauthor of Public School Law: Teachers’ and Students’ Rights, as well as The Superintendent’s Fieldbook and Schools That Learn. She served as president of the Education Law Association and the American Education Finance Association.
Andy Chan
Andy Chan is a British-born American resident with a passion for social justice issues and progressive causes. He has taken many roles in his 23 years volunteering with Seattle-based non-profit Books to Prisoners, and is currently its Vice President. He has been a jurist and MC for the Seattle Social Justice Film Festival since 2013, and is a former Chairman of the Margaret Kyros Foundation for Animals. He is a three-time iron distance triathlete and slow-but-steady ultra-runner. He will join any trivia quiz team, take any small role in a film, and disturb any nearby ears with his ‘musicianship.’
Andy has a long history working with low-income residents of public housing, is currently employed by Seattle Housing Authority, and also contracts with Providence Housing to provide quality assurance for their service coordinators. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Bristol, England.
Gloria Davis
Ms. Gloria J. Davis’s professional career extends over 46 years in education and education administration. She believes all children can and will learn regardless of circumstances when given the ingredients of high expectations, care, and the adult belief that they are capable of achieving success. After retiring as superintendent of Decatur Public Schools in 2015, she became superintendent of School District #428 of the Department of Juvenile Justice, which is responsible for education in all five Juvenile Justice Centers throughout Illinois. The district has been under a federal consent decree since 2010 to improve educational outcomes for all the youth in the juvenile centers. Under Ms. Davis’s leadership, in the past two years she has improved district procedures so that more than 200 youth graduated high school in a single year. The district has increased staff, provided a more coherent educational approach through “Blended Learning,” and greatly increased meaningful classroom work through focused professional development and improved technology.
During earlier superintendent positions with Dodge City, Kansas (2001- 2006) and Decatur, Illinois (2006 – 2014), Ms. Davis provided the vision of putting students first while engaging the community and sustaining growth and progress through strategic planning. She was recently elected Chairperson of the Superintendent Commission of the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE). In addition, she has been appointed to the Illinois Advisory Board for Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education and the Illinois State Advisory Council on the Education of Children with Disabilities.
James Harvey
James Harvey has served as executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable since 2006, following a decade in a similar position with the Danforth Foundation’s Forum for the American School Superintendent. With the Roundtable, he has helped organize eight study missions to China and a twelve-day study mission of schools in Finland, France, and England. The European mission included a meeting at the Organization for Economic Collaboration and Development (OECD) in Paris, for a briefing on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In 2014, he co-managed an Education Week blog on “Assessing the Assessments” with Madhabi Chatterji of Teachers College, Columbia University. The blog encouraged an exchange of ideas on assessment between scholars in the measurement and psychometric worlds and superintendents from the Roundtable.
Harvey is the author or co-author of dozens of articles and five books on education and education policy. They include A Legacy of Learning (2000, with David Kearns former CEO of Xerox) and The Superintendent’s Fieldbook (2nd ed. 2013). He was the major staff writer of A Nation at Risk, the seminal report issued in the administration of Ronald Reagan.
Earlier in his career he served in the Carter administration as an education lobbyist and on the staff of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he organized oversight hearings monitoring implementation of Federal education legislation and helped draft major education legislation, including support for elementary and secondary schools, for colleges and universities, and for students with disabilities. A native of Ireland, Harvey holds a doctorate from Seattle University.
Aurora Martin
Aurora Martin is the founder of popUPjustice and former director of Columbia Legal Services. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Washington. She began as an intern in 1995 with the Refugee Clinic of Evergreen Legal Services, CLS’s predecessor organization. Since joining CLS, she has served as a National Equal Justice Works Fellow focused on housing and expanded leadership development efforts and access to justice issues. Among her accomplishments she re-envisioned CLS’s community worker program as a pipeline for local legal aid lawyer development.
Anne Paxton
Anne Paxton, executive director of ProForum and director of the Social Justice Film Festival since 2013, is a journalist and attorney with several years’ experience as a writer and analyst in Washington DC and Seattle on health care policy, information technology, and state regulation of professionals. From 2005 to 2012, she made documentary films to help non-profits support such causes as prisoner literacy (Books to Prisoners), cleft palate surgery in Guatemala (Hearts in Motion), Palestinian rights (Pressure Points), sustainability curriculum (Facing the Future) and Basic Health Care (Northwest Health Law Advocates). A graduate of Whitman College, she holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Maryland and a J.D. from Seattle University.
Lauren Taubman
Lauren Taubman’s social justice conscience was formed as a child growing-up in Jim Crow-Oklahoma. After moving with her family to southern California, her first form of activism was quelling a race riot on her high school campus the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The Ford Foundation studied the program that she and her Black student friends created and implemented it as a model to prevent racial strife in schools. Taubman opened a fringe theater in London and produced/directed award-winning plays, including David Rabe’s Sticks & Bones (invited to the English National Theatre). Taubman practiced litigation until her passion for social justice led her to produce Bopha!, Hollywood’s only anti-apartheid drama told from the Black perspective, directed by Morgan Freeman, starring Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard. Taubman recently executive produced the feature doc. “Killswitch,” which was selected for a series of special screenings at IDFA, along with Laura Poitras’ doc. Citizen Four. Killswitch has been shown at film festivals around the world, as well as on Capitol Hill before 150-members of Congress and activists across North America on the eve of the FCC’s Net Neutrality decision. She is also the co-founder/publisher of the Occupy Movement’s international, activist website Occupy.com.
