EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Time:	4:00 PM -- 5:30 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His research spans such diverse areas of education policy as the impact on achievement of teacher quality, high stakes accountability, and class-size reduction. He recently coauthored, with Alfred A. Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009). Mr. Hanushek is chairman of the executive committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He also serves as chair of the board of directors of the National Board for Education Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education along with being a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and the American Education Research Association. He was awarded the Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in 2004. In addition, Mr. Hanushek is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1965 to 1974.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI and an executive editor of Education Next. His many books include When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008), No Remedy Left Behind (AEI Press, 2007), Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2006), Tough Love for Schools (AEI Press, 2006), Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Spinning Wheels (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). His work has appeared in both popular and scholarly outlets, including Social Science Quarterly, the Harvard Educational Review, Education Week, Phi Delta Kappan, the Washington Post, and National Review. Mr. Hess serves on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education, as a research associate with the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance, and as a member of the research advisory board for the National Center for Educational Accountability. He is a former high school social studies teacher and has taught at Harvard and Georgetown universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia.

Alfred A. Lindseth is a senior partner at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. A member of Sutherland’s Litigation Practice Group, he has earned a national reputation representing and advising state and local school authorities in the resolution of complex disputes involving their obligations under state and federal constitutions. He is the coauthor, with Eric A. Hanushek, of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009) and, for the past twenty-five years, has worked closely with lawyers from the offices of the state attorney general in states as diverse as Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and North Dakota in important school finance and educational adequacy cases, bringing them to successful conclusions through litigation, negotiations, legislative action, or a combination of strategies. Mr. Lindseth is a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and a former instructor at and spokesman for the U.S. Army Ranger School.

Randi Weingarten is the newly elected president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents more than 1.4 million teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other health care professionals; and local, state, and federal employees. Previously, Ms. Weingarten was president of the United Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2, since 1998, representing 110,000 nonsupervisory educators in the New York City public school system, as well as home child care providers and other workers in health, law, and education. Ms. Weingarten also led New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization for the city’s one-hundred-plus public-sector unions for ten years. In that position, which she left after being elected AFT president, she coordinated labor negotiations and bargained for benefits on behalf of the unions’ 365,000 members. Last year, she partnered with Green Dot Schools, which operates unionized charter schools in California, to start a high school in the South Bronx in September 2008. From 1991 to 1997, Ms. Weingarten was a history teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.

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