Speaker biographies
Aminda Gentile is the vice president for education issues at the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the director of the UFT Teacher Center, a professional development network providing research-driven, school-based support to schools and districts at more than 350 sites throughout New York City. Ms. Gentile serves on both the New York State Teacher Center Task Force and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Education Committee. She works closely with other AFT locals, spearheading the design and development of professional development models in other states. During her teaching career, Ms. Gentile taught all grades of elementary school, as well as remedial reading and remedial math.
Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation's Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. Mr. Hassett's popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS's Morning Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.
Howard Nelson is a lead researcher for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in the office of the president. He is currently studying various aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act, especially adequate yearly progress provisions. Mr. Nelson is also studying teacher mobility as it relates to the shortage of quality teachers in high-needs schools and identifying ideas for improving the supply of teachers to these schools. He is an author of a controversial study released in 2004 titled Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Previously, he directed the federally-funded National Charter School Finance Study and is the lead author of three studies on school financing. For several years, he prepared the annual fifty-state salary survey of the AFT. Mr. Nelson has written several book chapters and published over three dozen articles in various journals and magazines. Before joining the AFT, he taught school finance in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Michael J. Petrilli is the 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 George W. Bush administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Education, where he helped coordinate the No Child Left Behind Act'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.
Jonah Rockoff is an assistant professor of economics and finance at the Columbia Graduate School of Business and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Rockoff's interests center on local public finance and the economics of education. He has done research on the determinants of property taxation and expenditure in local public school districts, the relation between crime risk and local property values, the impact of teachers and teacher certification on student achievement, and measuring the educational quality of charter schools. His current work focuses on identifying preemployment indicators of effective teachers and how teacher induction programs and mentoring can improve outcomes for new teachers.
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