EVENTS

Date:	Thursday, May 28, 2009
Time:	9:00 AM -- 3:45 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Speaker biographies

Jan Biros is associate vice president for instructional technology support and campus outreach at Drexel University. She joined Drexel in 1986 in a special projects role to promote and market courseware developed by Drexel faculty as part of the groundbreaking microcomputer program established in 1983. Ms. Biros has been involved with the Philadelphia School District, the Mayor's Commission on Literacy, and Philadelphia Futures. She served on the advisory and development committee organized by Microsoft and the School District of Philadelphia to create the School of the Future and was a member of the technology advisory committee for the Franklin Learning Center in Philadelphia.

Dennis Cheek is vice president for education at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he supervises work on the future of learning, STEM education, youth entrepreneurship, and education research and policy. He is a former middle- and high-school science and social studies teacher, curriculum developer, superintendent, and senior administrator in two state departments of education. Mr. Cheek has authored, edited, or contributed to over 750 publications and multimedia products and has been an adjunct professor at eight colleges and universities.

Mitchell Chester is commissioner of the Massachusetts public schools, where he oversees the public education of the commonwealth’s nearly 1,900 schools and more than 1 million students. Previously, he served as the senior associate superintendent for policy and accountability in the Ohio Department of Education, where he oversaw standards, accountability, policy development, and strategic planning. He was also responsible for the state’s implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. Previously, Mr. Chester served as the executive director for accountability and assessment in the School District of Philadelphia, where he headed the offices of assessment, research and evaluation, student and school progress, and pupil information services. Mr. Chester began his career as an elementary school teacher in Connecticut.

John Chubb is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He is also senior executive vice president and cofounder of Edison Schools, a company that partners with public school districts and charter school boards nationwide to provide innovative schools and education programs. Mr. Chubb has previously served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a faculty member at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, with Terry Moe (Brookings, 1990). His articles have appeared in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, The Public Interest, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine.

Mary Cullinane is the director of innovation and business development for the Microsoft Corporation. A former teacher, she joined Microsoft in 2000, where she has worked to promote innovative programs and initiatives, including as national program manager of the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation and creator of the Microsoft Innovation Center Awards. In 2003, Ms. Cullinane accepted the position of School of the Future technology architect, responsible for driving the creation of the new high school. In 2008, she became the U.S. director of innovation and business development for the Microsoft Education Group. Ms. Cullinane, a recipient of the Microsoft Circle of Excellence Award, has spoken at national and international conferences on topics such as educational technology, school reform, and strategic leadership. She has testified before Congress and has appeared on PBS, National Public Radio, and ABC News and in Wired magazine.

Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. His funded research includes four grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education to explore immersive and semi-immersive simulations as a means of student engagement, learning, and assessment. Mr. Dede’s books include Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods (Harvard Education Press, 2006).

Denis Doyle is cofounder and chief academic officer of SchoolNet, an online community that aggregates education strategies, best practices, research, resources, and tools from across the web. Previously, he served as a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute, director of education policy studies at AEI, and a federal executive fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Doyle has written numerous education and popular articles that have appeared in outlets such as Education Week, Phi Delta Kappan, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. His many books include Reinventing Education (EP Dutton, 1994), Winning the Brain Race (ICS Press, 1989 and 1991), and Investing in Our Children (CED, 1984).

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. During his career, Mr. Finn has served as a professor of education policy at Vanderbilt University, counsel to the U.S. ambassador to India, legislative director in the office of former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and assistant secretary of education for research and improvement. He serves on the board of numerous organizations concerned with primary and secondary schooling and has authored fourteen books and over 350 articles. His work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Education Week, Harvard Business Review, and the Boston Globe.

Kate Hayes is a counseling educator and the organizational chair for the School of the Future in Philadelphia. She has been a part of this innovative project since the school opened in September 2006. Ms. Hayes’s responsibilities include learner intervention, case management and programming, flexible school scheduling, project offerings, assessment presentation, and various university partnership programs. Prior to joining School of the Future, she was a graduate assistant in the Office of Student Life at Villanova University, where she collaborated on learning community and service learning projects.

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 University, Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia.

Doug Lynch is the vice dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on corporate learning, the economics of education, and social entrepreneurship. Formerly, he worked at New York University, where he led numerous online learning initiatives; at the College Board; and at Arizona State University, where he helped launch one of the country’s first charter schools. Mr. Lynch is the chair of the U.S. Delegation to the International Standards Committee project on global standards in nonformal education. He is the coauthor of Corporate/Higher Education Partnerships—When Values Align (forthcoming).

Patrick McGuinn is an assistant professor of political science at Drew University. His work on education policy has been published in popular and scholarly journals such as Publius: The Journal of Federalism, The Public Interest, the Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, and the Journal of Policy History. He has also written chapters in the edited volumes Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2006) and No Remedy Left Behind (AEI Press, 2007). His first book, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005 (University of Kansas Press, 2006) was honored as a Choice outstanding academic title. Mr. McGuinn is a former high school teacher.

Kent McGuire currently serves as the dean of the College of Education and is a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies at Temple University. Previously, Mr. McGuire was senior vice president at Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, where his responsibilities included leadership of the education, children, and youth division. From 1998 to 2001, he served in the Clinton administration as an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, where he was the senior officer for the department’s research and development agency. As the education program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts from 1995 to 1998, Mr. McGuire managed Pew’s K-12 grants portfolio. From 1991 to 1995, he served as education program director for the Lilly Endowment.

Dale Mezzacappa has reported on education since 1986, most of that time with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Prior to taking over the education beat, she was in the Trenton and Washington bureaus covering politics and government. Her work has won several local and national journalism awards, including for a series spanning thirteen years that followed 112 inner-city sixth graders promised a free college education by a wealthy philanthropist. Ms. Mezzacappa is currently a contributing editor at The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, a quarterly independent and nonprofit publication. She also teaches a journalism course at Swarthmore College and sits on the board of the Education Writers Association.

Matthew Riggan is a researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in the edited volume The Implementation Gap: Understanding Reform in High Schools (Teachers College Press, 2008) and is forthcoming in the Peabody Journal of Education. His current evaluation work includes studies of the Annenberg Foundation’s Distributed Leadership Initiative and the William Penn Foundation’s Twenty-first Century Skills Project. He teaches research methods at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and the Wharton School of Business.

Susan Schilling is the CEO of the New Technology Foundation, which she joined in 2001 to assist communities in creating a New Tech High School, a technologically advanced secondary school model that now has over forty networks nationally. Previously, Ms. Schilling was general manager at Lucas Learning, a multimedia educational company formed by George Lucas. Before that, she was senior vice president and creative director for MECC, one of the first and premier developers and publishers of educational software for K-12 schools.

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