Annamarie Francois is the executive director of UCLA's Center X, where she guides the work of equity-driven educator preparation, development, and support for urban school communities, and is a faculty member in the UCLA Teacher Education Program. She has over thirty years of teaching, teacher leadership, and administrative leadership in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the charter school community, and UCLA's Department of Education. Francois is currently the University of California representative on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, advisor to the California State University Center to Close the Opportunity Gap, and board president of the Center for Powerful Public Schools. She is an active contributor to national, state, and local networks working to develop models for equity-driven, student-centered, antiracist practices within educator preparation programs. Her public scholarship, teaching, and service support educator development, critical multicultural education and culturally responsive literacies, and transformative school-university collaboration. She received her BA from UCLA; her MA in higher education, administration, and supervision from California State University, Northridge; and her EdD in Educational Leadership from UCLA. Karen Hunter Quartz directs the UCLA Center for Community Schooling and is a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her research, teaching, and service support community school development, teacher autonomy and retention, and educational reform. Quartz led the design team in 2007 to create the UCLA Community School and served in 2017 on the design team for a second site, the Mann UCLA Community School. She currently oversees a portfolio of research-practice partnerships at both schools, designed to advance democracy, inquiry, and change. She is recipient of the 2001 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, the 2004 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the 2017 national Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative's Advancement in Research Award, and the 2017 Outstanding Professional Teaching Award from the UCLA Department of Education. She received her BA from Huron College, MA in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and her PhD in education from UCLA.
