Professor Walter G. Secada is a graduate of Miami’s Curley High School. He left Southeast Florida to earn a BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, an MS in mathematics and Ph.D. in education, both, from Northwestern University.

Since joining the University of Miami faculty in fall 2003, Professor Walter G. Secada has been associate director and Co-PI of Promoting Science among English Language Learners (P-SELL) with a High-Stakes Testing Environment, a quasi-experimental study on effective science instruction for Haitian-Creole or Spanish-speaking third through fifth graders; associate director and co-PI of Science Made Sensible a fellowship training program that pairs doctoral students in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) with middle-school teachers; and a member of the University’s Social Sciences Institutional Review Board . Finally, Dr Secada has worked on the development of a secondary-school mathematics and science academy that will be built on the UM South Campus property that is currently under development according to the principles of the new urbanism.

Prior to coming to UM, Dr. Secada was professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin—Madison; director of Diversity in Mathematics Education , a fellowship-training Center on Learning and Teaching funded by the National Science Foundation; director of teacher-training and technical assistance centers devoted to teachers of students who received federal funding through Title 1, migrant education, bilingual education, and/or American Indian education; and a former associate dean of the School of Education.

As director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Hispanic Dropout Project, he was senior author of its final report, No More Excuses , which was released at a White House press conference by then-Vice President Gore and Secretary of Education Riley. Secada was editor of the Review of Research in Education published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and series editor for Changing the Faces of Mathematics published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).

Professor Secada’s research interests have included equity in education, mathematics education, bilingual education, school restructuring, professional development of teachers, student engagement, and reform. Recent publications include Conceptions of Equity in the Teaching of Science and (with Santiago Cueto) Eficacia escolar en escuelas bilingües en Puno, Perú [in Revista Electrónica Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación, 1(1)].

A fluent speaker of Spanish, Secada has presented at major conferences in Chile and Peru; as well as throughout the United States, and in Thailand, Taiwan, Greece, Norway, England, Germany, and South Africa. He is a member of AERA, NCTM, and the National Association for Bilingual Education.