Vicki Graf, professor of education, was selected to serve on California’s Statewide Special Education Task Force – charged with analyzing the state’s systems for serving students with disabilities and providing policy recommendations to the State Board of Education, the California Department of Education and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
A professor of education at LMU for more than 30 years, Graf is the former director of the special education program and has published and presented widely on the topics of inclusion, bilingual/multicultural special education and teacher credentialing. She has been principal investigator or co-PI on multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and currently serves on the board of WISH Charter Elementary, a member of the LMU Family of Schools.
With about 10 percent of California’s 6.3 million students classified as having a disability according to Edsource, California’s statewide education leaders have established this task force to examine ways the state can better serve students with disabilities. Funded by the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation and the Stuart Foundation, the task force will look at issues including school funding and the Local Control Funding Formula, teacher preparation and credentialing, the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, as well as service delivery options and accountability measures.
Task force membership includes parents, teachers, school and district administrators, university professors, members of the policy community and other stakeholder groups, and will be co-chaired by Carl Cohn, former Superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District and a current member of the State Board of Education, and Fred Weintraub, currently the federal court-appointed independent monitor for the Los Angeles Unified School District. The initiative will be co-directed by Vicki Barber, former superintendent of schools for El Dorado County, and Maureen Burness, former assistant superintendent for student support services with the Folsom Cordova Unified School District.
