Getting California kids to read: What will it take?

David B. Goldberg, a bilingual teacher at Murchison Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is the president of the California Teachers Association (CTA). An educator since 1997, Goldberg has a long history of union activism. He previously served as CTA vice president and secretary-treasurer for four years each, as well as two three-year terms on the CTA Board of Directors. Goldberg also previously served as treasurer of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).

Megan Potente has been active in Decoding Dyslexia CA (DDCA) leadership for over four years. She is also a Co-Leader of DDCA’s San Francisco Support Group and serves as DDCA’s Regional Leader for San Francisco/Peninsula Region. Megan is a former 20-year elementary educator with experience as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, literacy coach, special education teacher, and educational therapist in private practice.

Claude Goldenberg is Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. He was on the National Research Council’s Committee for the Prevention of Early Reading Difficulties in Young Children and on the National Literacy Panel, which synthesized research on literacy development among language-minority children and youth. He is also a former first grade and junior high teacher.

Kareem is co-founder and leader of Full and Complete Reading a Universal Mandate (FULCRUM) and a member of the Oakland and California NAACP Education Committee. He is currently working to improve literacy rates across the country by engaging stakeholders around reading instruction and the systematic structures needed to cultivate excellent outcomes for all students.

Kareem previously led the Western Region for New Leaders, an educator development organization that supports the professional growth of teachers and administrators while preparing them to serve schools and communities desiring improved outcomes across a variety of measures. His background as an award-winning teacher and administrator in Oakland, California, and Columbia, South Carolina have provided important insight to his work supporting others.

Penny Schwinn served as Tennessee Education Commissioner from January 2019 until June 2023 and is currently the Vice President of PK – Pre-Bachelors programs with the University of Florida.

Schwinn has overseen a number of initiatives including: restructuring a $9B school finance system; leading a nationally recognized literacy initiative that resulted in an 8-point gain statewide over two years; overseeing efforts to redesign the teacher preparation market and make teaching a federally recognized apprenticeable profession; designing and launching the largest and most comprehensive student acceleration program in the country; a $500M statewide redesign of high school to align K-12, post-secondary and workforce; and securing both the largest recurring and one-time investments in K-12 education in the history of the state of Tennessee.

John Fensterwald joined EdSource in 2012. For three years before that, he was founder and editor of the “The Educated Guess” website, a source of California education policy reporting, sponsored by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. For the preceding 11 years, John wrote editorials for the Mercury News in San Jose, with a focus on education.

He worked as a reporter, news editor and opinion editor for three newspapers in New Hampshire before receiving a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 1997. His wife is a retired teacher, and their daughter is a neurology resident at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.

Zaidee Stavely covers immigration and education for EdSource and hosts the weekly podcast, Education Beat. She is a bilingual print and radio reporter who has worked in Mexico and the U.S. She has covered education, immigration, environmental justice and traditional arts for KQED, Radio Bilingüe, and Public Radio International’s “The World,” among other outlets.

Zaidee has won numerous awards for her journalism, including an Emmy, a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award, an Excellence in Journalism Award from SPJ Northern California, and the Rubén Salazar Award from CCCNMA: Latino Journalists of California. She grew up in rural Mendocino County, where both her parents taught in public one-room schoolhouses. She has a Master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies and Community Studies from UC Santa Cruz. She lives in Oakland with her husband and two children.