María G. Hernández

Dr. María G. Hernández is currently the Deputy Executive Director of School Change and Community Engagement and Co-Director of the Innovations in Equity and Systemic Change (IESC). She has over a decade of experience providing technical assistance, training, and consultancy to districts, schools, and educational institutions to address race, ethnicity, language, and ability disproportionate outcomes. She partners with districts and schools in building their capacity in Culturally Responsive Sustaining Education (CR-SE), creating equity visions, data driven culture, instructional leadership, positive school climate, family and community engagement and devising action plans with multiple districts in making changes to system policies and practices to develop equitable educational systems. Her approach of relying on evidence-based research, implementation science, culturally responsive equitable systems and developing ongoing transformative relationships in educational institutions has led to shifting mindsets, policies, practices, and procedures. In the forthcoming book (in press), Dismantling Disproportionality: A culturally responsive sustaining systems approach, Dr. Hernández and her colleagues offer a concrete multi-pronged training and technical assistance approach to disrupt disproportionality in education and provide case studies of districts that, through training and technical assistance support, shifted systems to be more equitable for students of difference. Dr. Hernández also has over 15 years of experience working with and researching recently arrived immigrant Latinx children and families, including overseeing various elementary school programs; developing and managing extended summer learning programs for multilingual learners; creating partnerships between schools, community, and families; and working with families of young children with developmental delays. She has managed and designed studies focusing on immigrant origin adolescents and young adults. Her current research interest focuses on assessing the impact of (CR-SE)/anti-racism training and technical assistance on educators, schools and districts. She holds an MSW and Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MA in Educational Leadership from New York University.