Conference Speakers

Jorge A. Aguilar

Jorge A. Aguilar began his career in education as a Spanish teacher at South Gate High School. He is currently the superintendent of Wonderful College Prep Academy in Sacramento, California. Prior to this position, he served as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District, with responsibility for over forty thousand students and seventy-five schools. Previously he served as Associate Superintendent in Fresno Unified School District and Associate Vice Chancellor for Educational and Community Partnerships and Special Assistant to the Chancellor at the University of California, Merced.

Under his leadership, Aguilar has supported educators to significantly increase high school completion rates, dramatically reduce dropout rates, raise student performance, and improve post-secondary entry and success. He recently forged a historic agreement with the region’s major higher education institutions to enable Sacramento students to seamlessly transition to higher education. Aguilar is a champion for equity and access in education and has guided Sacramento City Unified in the creation of an award-winning Facilities Master Plan, which serves as a model for other districts for reimagining how construction and improvement projects are prioritized with a focus on schools that are historically underserved.

Aguilar also serves as a Commissioner on the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission, a Carnegie Learning Leadership Network member, and he provided plenary remarks for the 10th Anniversary Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education. He is recipient of the Winston Doby Impact Award for exceptional professionals chosen by their colleagues for commitment to improving educational opportunities for California students. In 2015, Aguilar was invited by first lady Michelle Obama to present on education equity and access as part of a White House initiative. The same year, he was appointed by California State Superintendent to the state’s Advisory Task Force on Accountability and Continuous Improvement.

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Latin American Studies and Spanish and Portuguese and earned his Juris Doctorate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He is the son of farm workers in the central valley of California and a product of the Migrant Education Program. He spent his early childhood migrating back and forth between Parlier, California and the state of Michoacán, Mexico.

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.

Erin is also the co-founder of Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School with her husband Dr. Eric Tucker. She is a recognized global leader in technology, mobile, and broadband and has focused much of her career on expanding access to technology in the US and abroad. She has led ground-breaking initiatives, including scaling wireless communications to the developing world, developing global and national strategic technology plans, and working with the country’s leading technology companies. Erin has served in an advisory capacity to the White House/OSTP’s US Ignite Initiative, the Obama Administration’s Global Development Innovation Policy, the State Department’s TechCamp program, and the Obama Administration’s interagency process for Rio 2.0 and Rio+20. Erin served as the founding Chief of Party for the USAID Global Broadband and Innovations Alliance—a $19.5 million global technology expansion project.

After starting her career as the Director of External and Strategic Relations for Arizona State University, Erin has served in senior positions with CHF International and Colter Companies. A recognized leader in alliance building, Erin serves in an advisory capacity for several leading international organizations, including SXSW EDU Launch, XPRIZE Foundation, Digital Promise, and The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She is an Aspen Institute Socrates scholar and a proud alumnus of the University of Michigan.

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.