Lauire Olsen
(California Tomorrow)

Dr. Laurie Olsen is Co-Director of California Tomorrow, a non-profit research and technical assistance organization. Olsen has been engaged in research on immigrant education for the past twelve years. Her work has braided research aimed at understanding the needs of immigrant students, a focus on the capacity and structure of public schools to respond to those needs, and attention to issues of public will and struggle over the role of schools in reproducing/mediating language, cultural and racial relations.

She is an expert on educational equity for immigrant students, students, of color, language minority students and low-income students. Since 1986, she has developed a national reputation as the architect of California Tomorrow's education reform at the school site, community and policy levels. In 1991, she was named Executive Director of California Tomorrow and led the organization though a major restructuring. She has directed the research and been the principal author of California Tomorrow's publications Crossing the Schoolhouse Border: Immigrant Students in the California Public Schools; Bridges: Promising Programs for the Education of Immigrant Students; Embracing Diversity: Teachers Voices from California Classrooms and The Unfinished Journey: Restructuring Schools in a Diverse Society, as well as four issues of California Perspectives, theme-based anthologies on education in a diverse society.

Olsen is currently the Director of a five-year Mellon Foundation funded research and demonstration project in secondary school immigrant education. This effort has involved five high school sites in efforts to restructure the school to be more responsive to issues of language, culture and immigrant needs. It will result in 1998 in two major research publications. One will be based upon the project's data set following three cohorts of immigrant students as they have moved through high school (n=2,500), and will offer new descriptive information about this population based on six typologies of immigrant students. The second will describe the school change processes of the five high schools as they learn more about their limited English Proficient students. It will also describe program models and instructional strategies developed by the project, and will present evaluation finding regarding the impact of the project on immigrant students' English language development and mastery of academic content.

Before joining California Tomorrow, Dr. Olsen, spent four years as Executive Director of the Citizens Policy Center/Open Road, where she authored, among other publications, Push Out/Step Out, on the root causes o students dropping out of school. Her career spans 20 years of social and policy research and advocacy on issues related to access and equity in schools, at-risk youth and youth involvement. For the Clearinghouse on Women's Studies at the Feminist Press, she was a teacher trainer and curriculum writer/editor of materials related to sex role stereotyping and sex discrimination in education. Before entering the field of education as a high school teacher in Vermont, she worked as an assistant to Dr. Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Today she is a sought after speaker and trainer to policymakers, practitioners and advocated on the impact of changing demographics on school and society. She is a member of the board and past chair of the National Coalition of Advocated for Students. Dr. Olsen's academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and a Master of Arts in Teaching. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies in Education from the University of California, Berkeley where she has been a Lecturer.

Her most recent book is Made in America: Immigrant Student in Public Schools based upon an in-depth ethnographic study of one high school undergoing demographic change due to immigration. It is an exploration of the contemporary version of Americanization in schools, and a study of the ways in which immigrants learn that to become American means giving up or going private with their home language, leaving behind their other-than-U.S. national and cultural identities and taking their places in the racial system of this nation.

Olsen is also currently serving as Co-Chair of Citizens for an Education America: No on Unz political action committee.