May 18, 2005

Speaker Biographies

Alan Bersin is currently superintendent of public education in San Diego, where he has led a major reorganization to focus resources more intensely on instruction. In July, he will join Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration as state education secretary and a member of the state board of education. Prior to becoming the leader of the nation's eighth-largest urban school district, Mr. Bersin served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California and as the attorney general's southwest border representative, a role in which he was responsible for coordinating federal law enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Jane Hannaway is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the study of educational organizations. She is the director of the Education Policy Center at The Urban Institute. She has also been a senior researcher with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Ms. Hannaway previously served on the faculty of Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford universities. She has authored or coauthored four books and numerous papers published in education and management journals. She served twice as vice president of the American Educational Research Association and also on its executive board.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at AEI and executive editor of Education Next. His books include Common Sense School Reform, Revolution at the Margins, Spinning Wheels, Bringing the Social Sciences Alive, Leaving No Child Behind, School Choice in the Real World, and A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom. He currently serves, among other roles, on the Review Board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education and on the Research Advisory Board for the National Center for Educational Accountability. Before joining AEI he was a public high school teacher, a professor of education and politics at the University of Virginia, and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Michael Usdan served for twenty years as president of the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), becoming senior fellow in July 2002. Before joining IEL, Usdan was Connecticut’s commissioner of higher education and also served as president of the Merrill-Palmer Institute in Detroit. Mr. Usdan has written numerous articles and books on aspects of education. Currently he is a member of the editorial advisory board of Phi Delta Kappan magazine, a consultant to the Hunt Institute in North Carolina and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and George Washington University. He has also served as a member and president of the city school board in New Rochelle, New York.

Joe Williams covers the New York City school system for the New York Daily News. From 1994 to 2000 he covered the Milwaukee Public Schools and that city's voucher program. Mr. Williams has won numerous national and local awards for education reporting and has authored a book on education politics that will be published by Palgrave MacMillan this fall entitled Cheating Our Kids.

Patrick J. Wolf is associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University. He is the principal investigator of the District of Columbia K-12 Scholarship Program impact evaluation and the School Choice Demonstration Project. Mr. Wolf is lead editor of the Brookings Institution book Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice and was a contributing author to The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools. In addition, Mr. Wolf has authored or coauthored more than a dozen articles and book chapters on school choice, special education, public management, and campaign finance. He was a member of the Gates-Brookings National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education and previously taught at Columbia University.

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