About

The goal of Education on the Line is intend to go behind the headlines and offer insights and analysis to help education leaders, school board members and advocates traverse the current perilous education landscape.

Louis Freedberg, Host & Producer

Louis Freedberg is a veteran education reporter and media innovator. He led EdSource, the leading source of education reporting in California, as executive director until 2021. He was the founding director of California Watch at the Center for Investigative Reporting. He spent 15 years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was an award-winning education reporter, Washington correspondent, columnist, and member of the editorial board. He was the founder of Youth News, one of the first youth media projects in the U.S. A John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, he has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in child development from Yale University.He worked in the schools for several years working with students in special education, focusing on autistic children, and was a founder of the Henry Street Project of The Growing Mind School, a school for adolescents on the margins of the public school system in Berkeley, California, where he led a mainstreaming program to integrate those students into the public school system shortly after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Pedro Noguera, Advisor & Guest Host

Pedro A. Noguera is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. A renowned sociologist, and compelling public speaker, Noguera’s research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional and global contexts.  His most recent books are Common Schooling: Conversations About the Tough Questions and Complex Issues Confronting K-12 Education in the United States Today (Teachers College Press) which was the winner of the Association of American Publishers 2022 Prose Award, with Rick Hess, and City Schools and the American Dream: Still Pursuing the Dream (Teachers College Press, 2001) with Esa Syeed. He has been a faculty member at UC Berkeley, Harvard, NYU, and UCLA. He has also served public school students as a high school teacher and school board member. In 2020 Noguera was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.