Dr. Louie F. Rodríguez is currently an assistant professor in Educational Leadership and Curriculum at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). He attended San Bernardino Valley College and transferred to CSUSB where he majored in psychology and became a McNair Scholar. After serving as a middle-school intervention specialist and later as a high school math teacher, Dr. Rodriguez spent 7 years at Harvard earning two master’s degrees and a doctorate in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His dissertation focused on issues of educational equity studying the experiences of Latina/o and Black high school students in the context of high-stakes testing, zero-tolerance policies, and school restructuring.
While a graduate student at Harvard, Dr. Rodriguez held several leadership roles as president of Comunidad Latina, served on the admissions committee for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was co-founder and inaugural co-chair for the Alumni of Color Conference (AOCC), and served as a Teaching Fellow with several Harvard professors for eight different graduate level courses. Prior to his current position at CSUSB, Dr. Rodriguez was on the faculty for three years at Florida International University in Miami where he served as the principal investigator of a school-based research project aimed at understanding student engagement issues in the context of poverty, high dropout rates, and a complex policy environment.
His current work focuses on issues of equity and access, specifically on the dropout crisis facing the Latino community. At CSUSB, Dr. Rodriguez is the principal investigator of the PRAXIS Project, Participatory Research Advocating for Excellence in Schools. This school/community-based project aims to study and advocate for educational excellence by directly engaging youth, educators, and community-stakeholders in the process of empirical research to positively impact educational policy and practice at the local and regional levels. He recently published in Leadership (2010), a practitioner based magazine reaching educators throughout California and just had a paper accepted into Teachers College Record, a top-tiered academic journal in the field of education.
Dr. Rodriguez has published in the areas of youth development, school dropout, and teacher development, and issues in Latino education. His work has appeared in several journals including: Educational Policy, New Directions for Youth Development, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Equity and Excellence in Education, The New Educator, The Urban Review, and Education and Urban Society, among others. He presents his work at national and local conferences yearly and is frequently sought by the media to comment on emerging issues in education.
In 2010, Dr. Rodriguez was the recipient of the 30 Under 35 Award for Latinas/os and Native Americans for his service to the community by California State Assembly Member Wilmer Amina Carter and received special recognition from Assembly Member Manuel Perez for this service to the 62nd assembly district in California. Dr. Rodriguez is currently working with the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP) at the regional and national levels, serves on the advisory board for the California Council on Economic Education, was awarded the American Association for Hispanic in Higher Education (AAHHE) Faculty Fellowship Award for 2011, and is a board member for the Hispanic Alumni Board at CSUSB.