Katherine Larson
(University of California, Santa Barbara)

I began teaching learning and emotionally disabled adolescents in 1974. I loved teaching very much. In 1980 I left teaching to pursue my doctorate in Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The focus of my doctoral studies was centered around the challenge of educating youth who were either economically or psychologically or socially at risk for school failure. I was especially interested in youth of color. My dissertation research was a social-cognitive intervention study of youth incarcerated in a California Youth Authority prison. This work involved working about 50% time with gang members living in Los Angeles. The intervention proved to reduce recidivism significantly and also demonstrated a considerable savings in costs to supervise youth after their release from incarceration. This work heightened my interest and passion for working with youth from low socioeconomic and minority backgrounds. I continued my research at UCSB where I am currently a full-time researcher and part time lecturer. At the completion of several studies on the effectiveness of social skill training, in 1990 I became the co-principal investigator of a five year federal school dropout prevention grant. I designed the multi-faceted intervention program called ALAS (wings in Spanish). This project focused on reducing school dropout in special education and high-risk Latino middle students attending urban school in Los Angeles. The intervention was comprehensive and focused on the youth, the family/community and the school. During this project I worked very closely with marginalized Latino families, engaged in a great deal of advocacy work and worked extensively with schools. The dropout intervention showed dramatic positive impacts on reducing school dropout and increasing credits toward high school graduation. As part of this project, we tracked students through their 12th grade year. It was out of our tracking efforts that my next area of focus emerged- the problem of school mobility or student transience. Through the tracking we came to find that most students made unscheduled school changes and many attended more than 5 secondary schools between 7th and 12th grade. It became clear that such high rates of mobility were negatively impacting Latino students. At the end of the dropout project, I became co-principal investigator of two research grants investigating the incidence, causes and consequences of adolescent school mobility. This research is currently on-going.

Russell W. Rumberger
(University of California, Santa Barbara)

My academic background is in engineering, economics, and education policy research. I received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1971, a Masters of Arts in economics from Stanford University in 1978, and a Doctor of Philosophy in education (economics and policy) from Stanford University in 1978. After graduate school, I worked at Ohio State University for two years and Stanford University for 6 years before coming to UCSB in 1987. In the early part of my career, my research interests were in the area of education and work. In the last ten years or so, my research interests have focused on school dropouts, school mobility, and educational underachievement of minority students. My disciplinary focus and research methods have shifted over the years, from a more narrow base in economics and quantitative research to a broader social science perspective using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. My two current research projects one on student mobility and the other on academic mentoring of young adolescents are both based on qualitative and quantitative research methods. I teach courses in research methodology, higher education, and education policy research.