Speaker biographies
Kevin Chavous is a partner at the law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, a distinguished fellow at the Center for Education Reform, and a cofounder and board chair of Democrats for Education Reform. Mr. Chavous led a team that worked with Governor Bobby Jindal (R-La.) to pass a scholarship program that will serve nearly one thousand students in the New Orleans parish, and served as a member of the education policy committee of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. From 1993 until 2004, he was a member of the Council of the District of Columbia. As chair of the Council’s education committee, he assisted in shaping the three-sector education partnership with the federal government, which funded the city’s first scholarship program enabling over two thousand low-income children to attend private school. He is the author of Serving Our Children: Charter Schools and the Reform of American Public Education (Capital Books, 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), No Child Left Behind: A Primer (Peter Lang, 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 Harvard Educational Review, 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 and as a research associate with the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance. He is a former high school social studies teacher and has taught at Georgetown University, Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Adam Schaeffer is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Previously, Mr. Schaeffer was a National Research Initiative fellow at AEI and an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Mr. Schaeffer has commented on a wide range of school choice, voucher, and tax credit policy issues in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, USA Today Magazine, National Review Online, and RealClearPolitics. He has an extensive background in online survey development, messaging experiments, and the strategic analysis of message, policy, and audience interactions.
Sheila Simmons is the director of the human and civil rights department at the National Education Association (NEA), where she leads the dropout initiative. Ms. Simmons joined the NEA in 1983 as a senior policy analyst in the area of teaching and learning, focusing on student achievement and teacher quality with special emphasis on research, evaluation, and assessment. She has served in several capacities for the NEA, including directing the Center for the Advancement of Public Education, a public policy department addressing the issues of vouchers, charter schools, and privatization. Prior to joining the NEA staff, Ms. Simmons was classroom teacher, school administrator, higher education administrator and faculty member, grant writer, urban planner, and education researcher and evaluator.
Kevin Welner is an associate professor of education and director of the University of Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center. His research focuses on education rights, jurisprudence, and educational opportunity scholarships. Mr. Welner is the author of NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), which explores tuition tax credit policies. He is also the author of Legal Rights, Local Wrongs: When Community Control Collides with Educational Equity (SUNY Press, 2001) and, with Wendy Chi, Education Policy and Law: Current Issues (Information Age Publishing, 2008). He has received the American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award in 2006, the Palmer O. Johnson Award for best article in 2004, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency, and a postdoctoral fellowship by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.
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