Speaker biographies
Richard Arum is a professor of sociology and education at New York University and program director of educational research at the Social Science Research Council. His most recent book, Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority (Harvard University Press, 2003), analyzes how variation in court decisions has affected public school disciplinary practices across jurisdictions and over time. Mr. Arum is also editor of The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education (McGraw-Hill, 1999) and coeditor of Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007). His numerous peer-reviewed articles on education have appeared in American Sociological Review, Criminology, Annual Review of Sociology, International Journal of Sociology, and Sociology of Education.
Samuel Bagenstos is a professor of law at the Washington University School of Law and visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. Before entering academia, he served as an attorney in the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice, a law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and a law clerk to Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Bagenstos has litigated precedent-setting disability rights and federalism cases in the federal courts of appeals and in the Supreme Court. He is the author of the book, Disability Rights Disarray: Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement (Yale University Press, forthcoming) and numerous articles published in the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others.
Alan Bersin is a member of the California State Board of Education and chairman of the executive committee of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. Previously, Mr. Bersin was California’s Secretary of Education, appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in July 2005 and serving until 2006. From 1998 to 2005, Mr. Bersin was superintendent of public education of the San Diego Unified School District, the nation’s eighth largest urban school district. He was also a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing from 2000 until 2003. Mr. Bersin has also served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California and as the attorney general’s Southwest border representative.
Clint Bolick is the director of the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. He has argued significant cases in both state and federal courts, winning school choice victories in the Supreme Courts of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Arizona, as well as in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris before the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the Goldwater Institute, Mr. Bolick was a cofounder and former vice president of the Institute for Justice and former president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice. Mr. Bolick is the author of several books including, David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary (Cato Institute, 2007), which received the Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty, and Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle Over School Choice and Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (Hoover Institution Press, 2004).
Martha Derthick retired in 1999 from the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she taught American government. She has written numerous books on American political institutions and public policy, including Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays on American Federalism (Brookings, 2001) and Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics (CQ Press, 2005). Together with Joshua M. Dunn, Ms. Derthick writes a quarterly column, “Legal Beat,” for Education Next.
John Dinan is associate professor of political science at Wake Forest University. His research focuses on state constitutions, federalism, and American political development. His most recent book is The American State Constitutional Tradition (University of Kansas Press, 2006). He is editor of the “Annual Review of American Federalism” issue of Publius: The Journal of American Federalism and contributes the annual “State Constitutional Developments” chapter for the Book of the States (Council of State Governments).
Joshua M. Dunn is assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he teaches constitutional law. His research focuses on the judiciary's role in shaping education policy. He is the author of Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins (University of North Carolina, 2008) and he coauthors, with Martha Derthick, a quarterly column on law and education for Education Next.
Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Thomas B. Fordham Institute, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and senior editor of Education Next. Previously, Mr. Finn served as assistant secretary for research and improvement at the U.S. Department of Education, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and founding partner and senior scholar with the Edison Project. The author of fourteen books and over 350 articles, his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Public Interest, Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and many other major publications, journals, and newspapers.
Robert Gordon is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Previously, he worked with the New York City Department of Education to overhaul the city’s school finance system and was the domestic policy director for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. For several years, Mr. Gordon worked for then Senator John Edwards (D-NC), serving as his judiciary counsel, legislative director, and policy director in the 2004 campaign. In the past, Mr. Gordon was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Skadden fellow at the juvenile rights division of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, and an aide to the National Economic Council and the Office of National Service in the Clinton White House. Mr. Gordon’s writing has been published by the Brookings Institution, the New Republic, Slate, and Washington Monthly, among other publications.
Michael Heise is a professor of law at Cornell University Law School, where he specializes in empirical legal scholarship, bridging empirical methodologies, legal theory, and policy analysis. He researches public and private law, including law and education policy, civil justice reform, and judicial decision making. Mr. Heise’s teaching areas include education law, torts, constitutional law, empirical methods for lawyers, insurance law, and law and social science. From 1991 until 1992, Mr. Heise served in the Bush Administration as deputy chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Mr. Heise has received numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Law & Society Association’s Best Article Prize in 1999. Mr. Heise has coedited the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies since 2005.
Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI and executive editor of Education Next. His many books include The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2008), No Remedy Left Behind (AEI Press, 2007), 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, American Politics Quarterly, 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 professor at the University of Virginia.
Paul Hill is a professor at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, where he served as acting dean from 2002 to 2003. He is also the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. Before joining the University of Washington faculty, Mr. Hill worked for seventeen years as a senior social scientist in RAND, Corp’s Washington Office, where he conducted studies of site-based management, governance of decentralized school systems, effective high schools, business-led education reforms, and immigrant education. While at RAND, he served as director of Washington operations from1981 until 1987 and as director of the education and human resources program from 1979 until 1980. In the past, Mr. Hill has directed the National Institute of Education's Compensatory Education Study--a congressionally mandated assessment of federal aid to elementary and secondary education--conducted research on housing and education for the Office of Economic Opportunity, and worked as a congressional fellow and a congressional staff member.
R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. professor of American politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard University program on constitutional government. His books include Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Brookings Institution Press, 1994) and Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Brookings Institution Press, 1983). He has also taught at Harvard University and Brandeis University, and served on the research staff of the Brookings Institution. Mr. Melnick writes on regulation and political jurisprudence.
Michael Petrilli is vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he oversees research projects and publications, including The Education Gadfly. He is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, executive editor of Education Next, and author, with Frederick M. Hess, of No Child Left Behind: A Primer (AEI Press, 2006). Previously, he worked at the U.S. Department of Education as associate assistant deputy secretary in the Office of Innovation and Improvement. In this role, he oversaw numerous discretionary grant programs to support a variety of education reforms--including alternate routes to certification and charter schools--and helped to lead the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act’s public school choice and supplemental services provisions. Before working at the Department of Education, he was vice president of community partnerships at K12, an internet education company. Mr Petrilli started his career as a teacher in Ohio.
Gerald A. Reynolds has served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights since 2004, and is assistant general counsel at Kansas City Power & Light Company. Previously, Mr. Reynolds served as a deputy associate attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice and as assistant secretary of education for the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. In the past, Mr. Reynolds was the president of the Center for New Black Leadership, a legal analyst for the Center for Equal Opportunity, and a lawyer with Schatz & Schatz, Ribicoff & Kotkin. Mr. Reynolds’ articles have appeared in Black Family Today, the Dallas Morning News, CQ Researcher, Orange Register, and the Washington Times. He is the editor of Race and the Criminal Justice System: How Race Affects Jury Trials (Center for Equal Opportunity, 1996).
James Ryan is the William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau professor of law, the Joseph C. Carter, Jr. research professor, and an academic associate dean at the University of Virginia School of Law. His scholarship focuses primarily on law and educational opportunity, and he has authored or coauthored articles on school finance, school desegregation, school choice, school governance, a right to preschool, and the No Child Left Behind Act, which have appeared in the law reviews at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, University of California, and New York University. Mr. Ryan has served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School and at Harvard Law School. In the past, he clerked for J. Clifford Wallace of the ninth circuit, and later for then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme CourtWilliam H. Rehnquist.
Peter H. Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin professor of law and chair of the Yale Law School where he has held the chair since 1984. He has also served as deputy dean. His major fields of teaching and research are tort; immigration, citizenship, and refugee law, as well as groups, diversity, and administrative law. His most recent books include Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples (with Richard J. Zeckhauser, Brookings Institution Press, 2006), Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), and Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Harvard University Press, 2003). He is coeditor, with David A. Martin, of Immigration Stories (Foundation Press, 2005) and coeditor, with James Q. Wilson, of Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (Public Affairs/Perseus, 2008). He is a member of the American Law Institute's advisory committee for the restatement of torts and a contributing editor to The American Lawyer. Prior to Yale, he was principal deputy assistant secretary for planning and evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Martin West is an assistant professor of education, political science, and public policy at Brown University. He also serves as an executive editor of Education Next, is deputy director of the program on education policy and governance at Harvard University, and is an affiliate of the CESifo research network. He is the coeditor of School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy (Brookings Institution Press, 2007) and No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability (Brookings Institution Press, November 2003), and the author of numerous articles on American education policy.
Ross Wiener is vice president for program and policy at The Education Trust, a national, nonprofit organization focused on closing achievement gaps in public education. Previously, Mr. Wiener served as a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice. As an attorney in the educational opportunities section, Mr. Wiener investigated and prosecuted violations of federal civil rights laws in schools and school districts across the country, including cases involving desegregation, disability rights, and harassment, among others.
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He also holds an appointment in the department of history in the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Mr. Zimmerman is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press, forthcoming), Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2006), Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Harvard University Press, 2002), and Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925 (University Press of Kansas, 1999). Mr. Zimmerman is a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other popular newspapers and magazines. In 2008, he received the Distinguished Teaching Award from New York University.
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