The HTH Graduate School of Education faculty reflects the school’s commitment to applying theoretical frameworks to practice and to linking educational leadership with graduate level coursework. All faculty members are experienced educators who introduce both the theory and actuality of effective teaching, research, and leadership to the graduate school classroom.
| Stacey Caillier, Ph.D. Ben Daley. M.A. Heather Lattimer, Ed.D. Robert C. Riordan, Ed.D. | Jeff Robin, M.F.A. Larry Rosenstock, J.D. Azul Terronez, M.A. Kelly Wilson, M.A. |
The HTH GSE Governing Board is an experienced group of leaders in education. The Board supports the mission and goals of the HTH GSE. The Board will have governance and fiduciary level control over the GSE. The board conducts its meetings in accordance with the Brown Act.
| Gary Jacobs Jim Cahill Kay Davis | Neeru Khosla Carl Maida, Ph.D. Lowell Potiker |
HTH GSE Advisory Board
The HTH GSE Advisory Board is a distinguished panel of leaders and innovators in K-12 and post-secondary education, many of whom have contributed key ideas to the creation and development of the HTH GSE. Board members serve in an advisory capacity, mentoring GSE faculty and students, visiting the campus to participate in the HTH Speaker Series, and offering guidance as to future directions for the institution.
| Richard C. Atkinson, Ph.D. Libia Gil, Ph.D. Gary Hoachlander, Ph.D. Frank Kemerer, Ph.D. | Deborah W. Meier, M.A. Leslie Santee Siskin, Ph.D. Nancy Faust Sizer |
HTH GSE Advisory Board
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Director of the Teacher Leadership program
Stacey Caillier is the Director of the HTH GSE Teacher Leadership M.Ed. program. Prior to coming to High Tech High, she completed her doctorate at UC Davis in School Organization and Educational Policy. At her dissertation site, she collaborated with teachers to design and implement an action research project that led to many school-wide reforms. As a graduate teaching fellow at UC Davis and an adjunct faculty member in Hamline University’s Graduate School of Education, Stacey taught courses on action research and socio-cultural issues in education, mentored practicing teachers, and presented her work at multiple educational conferences. She began her career as a high school physics and math teacher at a Portland, Oregon high school affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. She later served as a teacher and science specialist in a California charter school. Stacey majored in physics and English at Willamette University, where she also earned a Master’s in Teaching and a secondary physics and math credential.
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HTH GSE Governing Board
Jim Cahill retired as Manager of The Price Group, LLC in 2006.He was responsible for the investment and management of the financial portfolio of Sol Price, the founder of The Price Club chain of membership warehouse stores and all his related entities.
One of those entities, The Price Family Charitable Fund, is a charitable foundation, of which Mr. Cahill served as Executive Vice-President. The Assets of the Foundation and related charitable entities exceeded $370 million.
Mr. Cahill served on the Board of Directors of two publicly traded companies. Price Legacy, Inc. was a real estate investment trust with assets of over $1.1 billion, primarily in open-air shopping centers. PriceSmart, Inc. was an international retailer with 27 stores in 13 countries.
Currently, Mr. Cahill serves on the Board of Governors for The San Diego Foundation, is chairman of the Board of Directors of the San Diego Charitable Real Estate Foundation and is Director for High Tech High, an innovative charter school with seven campuses.
Among Mr. Cahill’s past community service are Board positions with Neighborhood National Development Bank, CitiLink Investment Company, Accion International, San Diego Incubator Corporation, Certified Development Corporation and San Diego Innovative Pre-School Project.
Mr. Cahill is the proud father of two boys, both currently in college.
Ben Daley, M.A. 
Faculty member in the Teacher Leadership and School Leadership programs
Ben began his High Tech High tenure as a physics and robotics teacher. His role evolved to School Director, and then to Chief Academic Officer and Chief Operating Officer. As CAO and COO, Ben works closely with school directors and teachers to provide leadership for hiring, curriculum, and professional development for all High Tech schools as well as working with other staff on the non-teaching side of the organization. Ben graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in physics and teaching credentials in both physics and math. He went on to receive a Master’s of Arts in Education with a focus on Teaching and Learning from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Kay Davis
HTH GSE Governing Board
Ms. Davis served nine years as a San Diego Unified School Board Member, where one of her major accomplishments was establishing the Business-Education Partnership Program. For seven years, she was the Director of the Business Roundtable for Education of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. She mobilized the business community on school-to-career programming, charter schools, standards, measurement, accountability, the selection of a new superintendent and passage of a $1.5 billion school bond.
Libia Gil, Ph.D.
HTH GSE Advisory Board
Libia Gil is a senior fellow for the American Institutes for Research (AIR), where she assists in leadership development initiatives and collaborates with states and districts to develop strategies for improving student achievement. Libia was Superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District for over nine years. Under her leadership, which began in 1993, the district experienced continuous growth and is currently serving more than 27,000 students in 43 schools. Libia also fostered the successful implementation of numerous partnerships and school change models, resulting in the creation of six charter schools that have shown continual gains in student achievement and customer satisfaction. In 2002, she received the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education for her outstanding leadership in Chula Vista. She is nationally recognized for her work in redesigning central office roles and functions to serve and support teaching and learning. Libia began her teaching career in the Los Angeles Unified School District and, with her colleagues, created a successful K-12 alternative school and numerous alternative classroom programs. She has held a variety of administrative positions including school principal, Area Administrator (supervisor of K-12 principals), and Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. Libia holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on bilingual and multicultural education from the University of Washington.
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HTH GSE Governing Board
Associate Dean, Professor of Education, Co-Director CANDEL, UC Davis
Full Bio Pending
HTH GSE Advisory Board
Gary Hoachlander is president of ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career. Beginning his career in 1966 as a brakeman for the Western Maryland Railroad, Gary has devoted most of his professional life to helping young people learn by doing—connecting education to the opportunities, challenges, and many different rewards to be found through work. Widely known for his expertise in career and technical education and many other aspects of elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, Gary has consulted extensively for the U.S. Department of Education, state departments of education, local school districts, foundations, and a variety of other clients. Gary is the president of MPR Associates, Inc., an educational research and development organization closely affiliated with ConnectEd. He is also one of the country’s leading policy analysts for the U.S. Department of Education, including the National Center for Education Statistics and the Office of Vocational and Adult Education. Both MPR Associates and ConnectEd are headquartered in Berkeley, California. Gary earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.
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Gary Jacobs
Chair, HTH GSE Governing Board
Mr. Gary Jacobs is the Managing Director of Jacobs Investment Company LLC (JIC). JIC was created in 1997 to participate in real estate development throughout the United States. In partnership with several developers, JIC has invested over sixty million dollars in projects ranging from government services to residential to commercial. Mr. Jacobs serves as Chairman of the Board of DermTech International, Ora Bio Ltd. and Nutrinia Ltd. Mr. Jacobs is also a director of Next Generation Technologies, GEO2 Technologies Inc., Flourinex Active Ltd. and Fallbrook Technologies.
In the community, Mr. Jacobs serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of High Tech High charter high schools, Graduate School of Education and national high school reform movement. HTH is founded on three design principles: personalization, adult-world connection, and a common intellectual mission. He also serves as Chair of the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Social Sciences at University of California at San Diego UCSD. He and his wife, Jerri-Ann, created the Gary and Jerri-Ann Graduate Fellowship in Social Sciences Endowment and the Jerri-Ann and Gary Jacobs Chair in Social Sciences.
In addition, Mr. Jacobs is a past president of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County. He and Jerri-Ann have endowed the Jerri-Ann and Gary Jacobs Teen Director position and created an endowment for the senior department at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, Jacobs Family Campus. Mr. Jacobs is also a board member of the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture, Jewish Community Foundation, The San Diego Foundation and the UCSD Board of Overseers.
In the summer of 2000, Mr. Jacobs created and funded the Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs International Teen Leadership Institute. The institute brings together ten Jewish teenagers from San Diego, ten Jewish teenagers from the Shaar HarNegev region in Israel, ten Israeli Bedouin teenagers from Segev Shalom and ten Palestinian teenagers from Gaza for a year long program during which participants and staff travel together to San Diego, study historical Muslim/Jewish relations in Spain for a week and then in Israel for a week to study with a modern perspective.
Mr. Jacobs graduated in 1979 from the University of California at San Diego with a B.A. in Management Science. He worked as a Software Programmer and Engineer at Linkabit Inc. and QUALCOMM from 1979 through 1996, then as a Senior Education Specialist until 2000 working with K-12 educational institutions to enhance science and math studies.
Mr. Jacobs lives in Del Mar with his wife Jerri-Ann, son Adam, daughters Sara, Beth, and Mara, and their dogs, Jasmine and Goldie.
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Frank Kemerer, Ph.D.
HTH GSE Advisory Board
As a Professor in Residence at the University of San Diego, Frank Kemerer teaches education law in both the School of Law and the School of Leadership and Education. For 25 years he taught education law as a Regents Professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he also served as the Director of the Center for the Study of Education Reform and conducted several major studies on school choice and charter schools. He received his doctorate in educational administration and policy analysis from Stanford University in 1975 with a law minor from Stanford Law School. He has authored, coauthored, or co-edited twelve books. Among them is the legal textbook Constitutional Rights (West Publishing Company 1979); School Choice and Social Controversy: Politics, Policy and Law (Brookings Institution Press 1999); and School Choice Tradeoffs: Liberty, Equity, and Diversity (University of Texas Press 2002). He received the Scribes Certificate of Distinction in 1992 from the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects for William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography (University of Texas Press 1991) and the 2002 Bronze Medal Book of the Year Award in Education from Foreword Magazine for School Choice Tradeoffs. His latest book, California School Law, was published by Stanford University Press in 2005.
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HTH GSE Governing Board
Neeru Khosla is currently the Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit organization, which aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Mrs. Khosla currently serves as a member on several advisory boards, including The Nueva School’s Board of Trustees, the Board of Directors for High Tech High School’s Graduate School of Education, the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the Advisory Board for DonorsChoose, the Advisory Board for Stanford University’s School of Education, and is one of the founding members of the K-12 Initiative of the Design School (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University. Mrs. Khosla holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Delhi University/San Jose State University, a Master’s of Science degree in Molecular Biology from San Jose State University, and a Master’s of Education degree from Stanford University.
Visiting faculty member in the Teacher Leadership program
A former middle and high school teacher, Heather Lattimer is currently a visiting professor at the HTH GSE and an assistant professor at the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego. Heather teaches curriculum design and evaluation, instructional methods, and action research and coordinates the Master's Credential Cohort and Master's of Arts in Teaching programs at USD. Her research interests include adolescent literacy, the development of historical understanding, and teacher professional growth. Heather is the author of two books, Thinking through Genre (Stenhouse, 2003) and Content Reading for Content Learning (NCTE, forthcoming) and has published in journals including Educational Leadership, Social Education, and Teaching Education. Heather earned her doctorate in education at the University of California, San Diego. She holds a bachelor's degree in Social Studies and a certificate in African Studies from Harvard University and a master's degree in education from Stanford University.
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HTH GSE Governing Board
Carl Maida is a professor at UCLA, where he teaches medical anthropology, global health, and scientific research ethics in the Graduate Program in Oral Biology. He has a joint appointment in the Institute of the Environment in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, where he teaches courses on action research methods and conducts community-based research on natural hazards, community toxics, environmental disease, and urban sustainability. He co-directs Howard Hughes Medical Institute Pre-College Science Education program at UCLA School of Dentistry. At UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, he conducts studies of the impact of natural disaster on children, adolescents and their families as a member of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, and as a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute, among persons living with HIV. He is a member of the UCLA Campus Sustainability Committee, and chairs its Academic Subcommittee. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, and the Society for Applied Anthropology.
Deborah W. Meier, M.A.
HTH GSE Advisory Board
Deborah Meier is currently on the faculty of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education as a senior scholar and adjunct professor. She is also a Board member and director of New Ventures at Mission Hill, director and advisor to the Forum for Democracy and Education, and on the Board of The Coalition of Essential Schools. Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. Between 1992 and 1996 she also served as co-director of the Coalition Campus Project that successfully redesigned the reform of two large failing city high schools, and created a dozen new small Coalition schools. She was an advisor to New York City’s Annenberg Challenge and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University from 1995-1997. From 1997 to 2005, she was the founder and principal of the Mission Hill School, a K-8 Boston Public Pilot school serving 180 children in the Roxbury community.
Meier attended Antioch College and received a Master’s in history from the University of Chicago. She has received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Brown, Bard, Clark, Teachers College of Columbia University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Hebrew Union College, Hofstra, The New School, Lesley College, SUNY Albany, UMASS Lowell, and Yale. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. Her books, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem (1995), Will Standards Save Public Education? (2000), In Schools We Trust (2002), Keeping School, with Ted and Nancy Sizer (2004) and Many Children Left Behind (2004) are all published by Beacon Press.
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HTH GSE Advisory Board
Ted Mitchell is President and CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education by supporting the creation of entrepreneurial organizations that serve the nation’s most underserved communities. Ted became the CEO of NewSchools in the fall of 2005. He began a lifetime’s work in education as a professor at Dartmouth College, moving to Stanford, then to UCLA, and most recently to Occidental College, where he served as President from 1999-2005. Ted is a national leader in the effort to provide high-quality education for all students and has long been active in California and Los Angeles educational reform initiatives. He currently chairs the Governor’s Committee on Educational Excellence, charged with making recommendations to overhaul California’s system of K-12 finance and governance. Ted received his bachelor’s degree in History and Economics, his master’s degree in History, and his doctorate in the history of American education, all from Stanford. He also served as a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees from 1985-1990.
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HTH GSE Governing Board
Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Mr. Potiker graduated from the University of Michigan in 1983 with a Bachelor’s degree in General Studies. He then moved to California to continue his education. He graduated from Pepperdine University with his Juris Doctor in 1986 and is a member of the California Bar.
Mr. Potiker has served in various executive roles including Vice President of Marketing for Entertainment Publications, Inc. of Troy, Michigan and Vice President of Acquisitions for HSP Group, Inc. a private venture group. He has also served on the boards of numerous organizations including The Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, the United Jewish Federation of San Diego, the Maritime Museum, The Burnham Institute and San Diego Jewish Academy. Mr. Potiker lives in La Jolla with his wife, Julie and their three children.
Robert C. Riordan, Ed.D.
Faculty member in the Teacher Leadership and School Leadership programs
Robert (Rob) Riordan is the Dean of the HTH GSE. Rob has worked as a teacher, trainer, and program developer for 35 years. He is one of the founders of High Tech High, and served as special assistant to the Principal at the Cambridge (MA) Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), overseeing the re-design of that high school into five small schools. Earlier, as a teacher at CRLS, Rob developed an award-winning writing center and two high school internship programs, for which he was named National School to Work Practitioner of the Year in 1994. He is co-author, with Adria Steinberg and Kathleen Cushman, of Schooling for the Real World: The Essential Guide to Rigorous and Relevant Learning (Jossey Bass, 1999). Rob was a lead researcher and then Director of the New Urban High School Project. He earned his M.A.T. and doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College.
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Faculty member in the Teacher Leadership program
I have been working at High Tech High since the beginning, out in the trailers, where we tried to figure out what we are about and what we are doing here. The school has changed a lot but we still remain a progressive liberal arts school with some science and math. I went to California College of Arts and Crafts to get my Masters in Fine Arts. That was the first and only place I have taken formal art classes, and I think that experience prepared me to work at High Tech High because we teach like a graduate school. Students work in the area that they are interested in and have experts in each field to help guide them. I am a guider not a teacher or a lecturer.
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Faculty member in the Teacher Leadership and School Leadership programs
Larry Rosenstock is the President of the HTH Graduate School of Education and the Chief Executive Officer of High Tech High. Larry earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Brandeis University in 1970. In 1985 he earned a Master’s of Education in Education Administration from Cambridge College, and in 1986 he received a law degree from Boston University School of Law. Larry taught carpentry for eleven years in urban high schools before serving as staff attorney at the Harvard Center for Law and Education. At the Center, he collaborated on the authorization of the 1990 Perkins Vocational Education and Applied Technology Act. He was, for six years, Executive Director of the Rindge School for Technical Arts (Cambridge, MA) which was at the forefront of current changes in technical arts education practice. Larry was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for five years, and later directed the New Urban High School Project of the U.S. Department of Education. He came to San Diego in 1997, as the president of Price Charities, and was one of the founders of High Tech High.
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HTH GSE Advisory Board
Leslie Santee Siskin is a noted sociologist of organizations and organizational change. Her research focuses on high school structuring, restructuring, and reform. She is the author or co-author of several articles and books about high schools, including Realms of Knowledge: Academic Departments in Secondary Schools, The Subjects in Question: Departmental Organization and the High School, and The New Accountability: High Schools and High-stakes Testing. She has been a Fellow at Columbia University and Cambridge University, and was Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at Hofstra before coming to New York University. Leslie earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University, and her bachelor’s from Middlebury College.
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HTH GSE Advisory Board
Nancy Faust Sizer is a career teacher who has worked in public and private high schools, including Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Phillips Academy, and the Wheeler School. With her husband, Theodore R. Sizer, she has taught at Brown University and currently teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Both Nancy and Ted recently served as acting co-principals at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School where Nancy also was Transition Counselor, helping to lead its first graduating class through the transition to postsecondary education. The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (Beacon Press, 1999) is her most recent book, written with her husband Ted.
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Faculty member in the Teacher Leadership program
After completing his Bachelors and Masters degree at UCLA, Azul Terronez began his career in education teaching in a 6th grade bilingual/ESL classroom in inner city Los Angeles. He taught for 5 years - focusing on humanities, reading and U.S. history - and served as an assistant principal at middle schools in Los Angeles and Texas. He was the principal of Hopewell Middle School in Round Rock ISD, where he took the school from Near Unacceptable to Recognized. He also worked as an Associate Programs Officer for the Texas High School Project and served as a consultant for New Technology Foundation. Azul is passionate about school climate and has worked with several districts and groups nationally, including the Boomerang Project and Learning For Living, Inc., to train counselors, teachers and principals on how to transform their schools. He has served as the Curator of Media for the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, California, the Director of the Nosotros Youth Theater in Hollywood, and was the Theatrical Director for Cat skills West in Beverly Hills. He was recently awarded Honorary Life Membership by the Texas Congress of Parents and Teachers. Azul has been with High Tech High in several capacities ranging from teacher to school director since 2005.
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Director of the School Leadership program
Kelly Wilson's passion for creating small school environments focused on project-based learning was sparked when she completed her M.A. in Education at Stanford University. In her first year of teaching, she had the exciting opportunity to help establish a small charter school for low-income students in East Palo Alto. Through that experience she found that personalized learning environments, where students are known well by adults and are asked to solve meaningful, real world problems, have a dramatic effect on student engagement and performance.
She was excited to be able to continue this work at High Tech High as a math/physics teacher when she relocated to San Diego in 2002, the town of her alma mater, UCSD. Teaching at High Tech High inspired Kelly to integrate more technology into her projects, including having students design and program robots, create video games that modeled the laws of physics, invent electronic products to market to the public and produce original documentaries. After teaching at HTH for 2 years, Kelly helped open High Tech High International with an exceptional team of teachers from HTH and was Director for 5 years. Having lived abroad in both Costa Rica and New Zealand, Kelly enjoyed having the opportunity to immerse students in new cultural experiences through the Immersion Program, and led trips with students to Costa Rica, Tanzania and Spain.
Going back to her roots, Kelly is excited this year to be working more closely with students and further developing her craft. She will be directing and co-teaching in the School Leadership M.Ed. Program in our Graduate School of Education, continuing to co-teach a Methods course in the HTH Credential Program and teaching a 9th grade exploratory on Media Literacy and Production at High Tech High International. In her "free" time, Kelly enjoys yoga, dance, hiking, snowboarding and spending precious time with friends and family
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