Gloria Ladson-Billings

Gloria Ladson-Billings

Gloria J. Ladson-Billings is an American pedagogical theorist and teacher educator on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education. Ladson-Billings is known, among other things, for her groundbreaking work in the fields of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Critical Race Theory. Ladson-Billings work The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children has been a significantly important text in the field of education. She was born in Philadelphia PA and was educated in the Philadelphia public school system. Ladson-Billings was the President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2005. During the 2005 AERA annual meeting in San Francisco, Ladson-Billings delivered her Presidential Address, "From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools," in which she outlined what she called the "Education Debt" highlighting the combination of historical, moral, socio-political, and economic factors that have disproportionately affected African-American, Latino, Asian, and other non-white students.