Rebecca Cruz - Ph.D., Special Education - Graduate College of Education
With more than a decade of experience as a teacher for public schools, Rebecca Cruz took her career to the next level by graduating this semester from the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education — a collaboration between SF State and the University of California, Berkeley. But this isn’t the first time Cruz has made her mark on SF State’s campus: She received her master’s degree in Education from the University in 2015 and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Special Education.
When Cruz is not teaching, she spends her time learning more about educational policies, how they are enacted in local communities and how they impact students’ educational experience. Her deep interest in these topics led her to write her dissertation on Brown v. Board of Education and how it resulted in exclusionary school discipline and disproportionality in special education.