Conference Speakers

Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell

Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell is a nationally recognized education leader with over 30 years of experience and a proven record of advancing equity, instructional excellence, and systemic reform. As the longest-serving Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District in the last three decades (2017–2025), she unified diverse stakeholders around a bold, equity-centered vision and mobilized business and community partnerships to secure over $300M in aligned investments. Under her leadership, the district eliminated a 22-year state loan, restored fiscal stability, and reinvested in instructional quality, competitive salaries, and student supports.

She led a nationally recognized COVID-19 response and co-established Oakland Undivided with the City of Oakland, closing the digital divide for thousands of students and families. Her leadership in expanding early literacy tutoring, career pathways, and Dual Enrollment contributed to historic gains in graduation rates, A-G completion, and postsecondary readiness. She also scaled a nationally recognized Community Schools model that improved student outcomes and well-being.

In addition to her role as Superintendent Emeritus, Dr. Johnson-Trammell serves as faculty at The Forum for Educational Leadership. She is the Board Chair of Women Leading Ed, Board President of the CORE Districts in California, and Co-Chair of the Oakland Thrives Leadership Council. Her honors include the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame Education Leader (2024), NAACP Oakland Branch Honoree (2024), San Francisco Business Times Most Influential Women (2023), and the OUSD Legacy Leadership Award (2025).

Erin Mote

Erin Mote is the CEO and Founder of InnovateEDU. In this role, Erin leads the organization and its major projects, including its policy and strategy portfolio. She leads the organization’s work on creating uncommon alliances to create systems change—in special education, talent development, artificial intelligence, and data modernization. An enterprise architect, she created, alongside her team, two of InnovateEDU’s signature technology products—Cortex, a next-generation personalized learning platform, and Landing Zone—a cutting-edge infrastructure as a service data product.

Christopher Steinhauser

Christopher J. Steinhauser served as superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District from 2002 to 2020. The school district is California's fourth largest, with about 70,000 students, 70 percent of whom receive free and reduced-priced lunches. Under Steinhauser's leadership, LBUSD earned the national Broad Prize for Urban Education and qualified as a finalist for the award five times. In a 2010 report, McKinsey & Company named LBUSD one of the world's 20 leading school systems—and one of the top three in the U.S.—in terms of sustained and significant improvements. The school district was later listed among the world's top five school systems by the nonprofit Battelle for Kids.

To ensure that there were equitable outcomes for all students in the school system, Steinhauser implemented a continuous improvement process where teams of educators from different schools would visit each other's schools to review student outcome data and observe colleagues' teaching. The purpose of this process was to make real time changes based on formative assessment data to better meet the diverse academic and social/emotional needs of the students in the system.

Under Steinhauser's leadership, the Long Beach College Promise was developed that became a national model on providing two years of free college to every student that enrolled in a community college upon graduating from high school. Since the implementation of the Long Beach College Promise, the college-going rate for students in LBUSD has been consistently higher than the State of California and the nation. To ensure that all students were college- and career-ready upon graduation from high school, Steinhauser implemented industry-based pathways systemwide through the Linked Learning approach to ensure equitable outcomes for all high school students.