Speaker biographies
Alan Bersin was appointed California’s secretary of education in July 2005 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prior to his appointment by the governor, he was superintendent of public education of the San Diego Unified School District. He has also served as the United States attorney for the southern district of California and as a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the EdVoice policy board, and the Broad Institute for Superintendents. Today, he is a member of the Board of Overseers for Harvard University and a member of the visiting committee for the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Julian Betts is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. He has written extensively on the link between student outcomes and measures of school spending, including class size, teachers’ salaries, and teachers’ education levels and is the coeditor of Getting Choice Right: Ensuring Equity and Efficiency in Education Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). His work on accountability has appeared in the Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Public Economics, The Economics of Education Review, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Morgan Brown is the assistant deputy secretary of the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to his appointment, Brown was the director of the Division of School Choice and Innovation at the Minnesota Department of Education. He has previously been involved in promoting education reform in several Minnesota organizations, including the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis, the St. Paul–based Partnership for Choice in Education, and the Twin Cities Financial Foundation. Brown previously spent seven years on Capitol Hill working as a legislative assistant and legislative director.
Michael Casserly is the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, the primary national organization that exclusively represents the interests of large urban public school districts. Before assuming this position, Casserly served as the organization’s director of legislation and research for fifteen years. He is currently spearheading efforts to boost academic performance in the nation’s big city schools, strengthen management and operations, challenge inequitable state financing systems, and improve the public’s image of urban education.
Stephen Clements is a policy research associate with the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Educational Research. His recent projects have included grant program coordinator duties for the Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant at Kentucky’s Education Professional Standards Board, and an education data system improvement project for the Kentucky Department of Education. His research interests have included the politics of the creation and passage of Kentucky’s 1990 education reforms, state-level school reforms enacted since the mid-1980s, the role of political culture in state education changes, the teacher workforce, and data needs for effective education policymaking.
Christopher Dunbar Jr. is an associate professor of educational administration at Michigan State University. His research focuses on issues of equity, with a particular focus on children most vulnerable to academic and social failure. He is the author of African American Males and Alternative Education: Does Anyone Know We're Here? (Peter Lang, 2001), which explores the school experiences of African-American males placed in an alternative school. His scholarly efforts during the past few years have focused on issues of race in education; zero-tolerance policy; and, most recently, No Child Left Behind.
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, 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 (which later grew into Edison Schools Inc.). 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.
Jay P. Greene is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s education research office and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He has conducted evaluations of school choice and accountability programs in Florida, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and San Antonio. His articles have appeared in policy journals, academic journals, and major newspapers. He is the author of Education Myths (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Greene has been a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston.
Jane Hannaway directs the Education Policy Center of the Urban Institute. Hannaway is a sociologist whose work focuses on structural reforms in education, particularly reforms promoting competition and choice. She is the immediate past editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and has coauthored five books and numerous articles in education and management journals. Previously, she served on the faculty of Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford Universities and was twice vice president of the American Educational Research Association.
Bryan C. Hassel directs Public Impact, a North Carolina–based education policy and management consulting firm. He consults with foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies on K-12 education improvement methods. Recently, he has focused on helping philanthropists invest strategically in charter schooling. Hassel is the coauthor of Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child’s School with Confidence (Armchair Press, 2004), author of The Charter School Challenge: Avoiding the Pitfalls, Fulfilling the Promise (Brookings Institution Press, 1999), and coeditor of Learning from School Choice (Brookings Institution Press, 1998).
Kati Haycock is director of the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.–based organization that advocates for the academic achievement of all students, especially poor and minority students. Previously, she was executive vice president of the Children’s Defense Fund and founder and president of the Achievement Council, a statewide organization that provides assistance to teachers and principals in predominantly minority schools. She also served as director of the outreach and student affirmative action programs for the University of California system.
Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research has focused on the boundary between private action and public action in addressing social problems. He is the author of several books, including The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (University Press of Kansas, 2001), and recently, coeditor of Mayors in the Middle: Politics, Race, and Mayoral Control of Urban Schools (Princeton University Press, 2004).
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and executive editor of Education Next. His many books include No Child Left Behind: A Primer (Peter Lang, 2006), With the Best of Intentions (Harvard Education Press, 2005), Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Spinning Wheels (Brookings Institution Press, 1999). His scholarly work has appeared in publications including Urban Affairs Review, Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Quarterly, and Teachers College Record. Hess is a research associate at the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance as well as a former high school social studies teacher and education professor.
Stephen C. Jones has been superintendent of Norfolk Public Schools since summer 2005. Prior to this appointment, he was superintendent of the Syracuse City School District, a middle school principal, a high school assistant principal, and executive director of Community of Caring, Inc., a comprehensive K-12 values-education and teenage pregnancy–prevention program. Jones has received several awards for his professional accomplishments and was superintendent of Norfolk Public Schools when it was awarded the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2005.
Julie Kowal is a consultant with Public Impact. She has conducted extensive policy research on school restructuring, including coauthoring white papers on the chartering, contracting, and turnaround restructuring options under No Child Left Behind. Kowal earned her law degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While in law school, she was coordinator of the street law program and interned with the UNC Center for Civil Rights, UNC School of Government, and the North Carolina Justice and Community Development Center.
Paul Manna is an assistant professor in the Department of Government and a faculty affiliate with the Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. His research and teaching focus on American public policy, elementary and secondary education, federalism, and applied research methods. He has written and published on No Child Left Behind, school vouchers, charter schools, teachers unions, and education governance. His book, School’s In: Federalism and the National Education Agenda (Georgetown University Press, 2006), analyzes the development of the federal role and federal-state relationships in K-12 education since the 1960s.
Patrick McGuinn is assistant professor of political science at Drew University and author of No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005 (University Press of Kansas, 2006). He was previously a visiting assistant professor at Colby College, a postdoctoral fellow at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University, a predoctoral fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, and a high school teacher. His work on education policy has been published in journals including The Public Interest, Teachers College Record, and Educational Policy.
Alex Medler is vice president for research and analysis at the Colorado Children's Campaign, a nonprofit, nonpartisan children’s advocacy group based in Denver. Medler has written extensively on education reform and worked with policymakers at the local, state and national level. He directed national activities to support charter schools for the U.S. Department of Education from 1997 to 2001. From 1992 to 1997 he was an analyst for the Education Commission of the States, where he directed an initiative to track major state education reforms. Medler is completing his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Michael J. Petrilli is vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.–based school reform organization. He served as a Bush administration appointee in the U.S. Department of Education, where he helped coordinate No Child Left Behind’s public school choice and supplemental services provisions and oversaw discretionary grant programs for charter schools, alternative teacher certification, and high school reform. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Education Next, Education Week, The Public Interest, and other publications.
David Plank is director of the Center for Education Policy at Michigan State University. His books include Choosing Choice (Teachers College Press, 2003), an international examination of school choice. He is currently a coinvestigator on three studies of school choice and reform in Michigan that relate to the enactment of competing reform strategies in professional development schools and charter schools, the ecological effects of expanded school choice opportunities, and a comparison of the impacts of school choice in multiple locales. He has worked as a consultant in education policy development for the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the United Nations Development Program.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, research professor of education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. She served as assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board under President Bill Clinton, from 1997 to 2004. Ravitch has written or edited more than twenty books, including The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003).
Marshall “Mike” Smith, a widely published education researcher, is the program director of the education program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. During the Clinton administration, he was acting deputy secretary and undersecretary of education, and during the Carter administration, he was chief of staff to the secretary for education and assistant commissioner for policy studies in the Office of Education. Prior to working in government, he has taught at Harvard University; the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Stanford University, where he was also the dean of the School of Education.
Joe Williams, a New York City–based journalist, is a senior fellow with Education Sector. Previously, he wrote about education issues for the New York Daily News and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Williams has won numerous state, local, and national awards for reporting on Milwaukee’s private school choice program in the 1990s, and recently published the book Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
John Winn, Florida commissioner of education, has served thirty years in education, as an elementary and middle school teacher and as an education reform leader. Prior to serving as commissioner, he served as deputy commissioner for accountability, research, and measurement at the Florida Department of Education. Winn has worked on a number of important projects, including the A+ Plan for Education, One Florida programs, the K20 education system, and charter school district legislation.
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