Lynne V. Cheney is a senior fellow at AEI, where she focuses on education policy and standards and the need for improved standards in U.S. History education for America’s students. Before joining AEI, Mrs. Cheney was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. She was a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution and more recently served on Texas governor George W. Bush’s education team. A novelist and widely published author, Mrs. Cheney has written on education and culture for the New York Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She is the author of Telling the Truth (1995) and coauthor, with her husband Dick Cheney, of Kings of the Hill (1996). Mrs. Cheney’s most recent book is America: A Patriotic Primer (2002), an alphabet book for children of all ages and their families that celebrates the ideas and ideals that are the foundations of America. She is currently completing A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women, a second alphabet book that honors the accomplishments of American women and will be published in fall 2003.

Michael Cohen became president of Achieve in January 2003. He is responsible for overseeing and enhancing Achieve’s efforts to ensure the high quality of standards-based reforms undertaken by states. Before joining Achieve, Mr. Cohen was a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, where his work focused on high school reform, particularly on the identification of state and local strategies for transforming urban high schools. He has been a leading figure in the national push to boost academic performance by leveraging higher standards. Mr. Cohen was director of educational policy at the National Governors Association from 1986 to 1990. From 1990 to 1993, he was director of the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, where he helped to launch the New Standards Project. Mr. Cohen has also served in several senior educational policy positions during the Clinton administration, including senior adviser to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, special assistant to the president in educational policy, and assistant secretary of education for elementary and secondary education. He began his career at the National Institute for Education, where he developed the Effective Schools research program. Mr. Cohen also served as director of policy development and planning at the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Chester E. Finn Jr., scholar, educator, and public servant, has devoted most of his career to improving education in the United States. As senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and senior editor of Education Next, his main focus is the reform of primary and secondary schooling. From 1985 to 1988, Mr. Finn served as assistant secretary for Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. Author of thirteen books and over 300 articles, his work has appeared in the Weekly Standard, Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Public Interest, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Business Review, and the Boston Globe. He writes a weekly column in the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s Education Gadfly.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at AEI and executive editor of Education Next. Mr. Hess’s books include Revolution at the Margins, Spinning Wheels, School Choice in the Real World, and Bringing the Social Sciences Alive. Mr. Hess’s work has appeared in many publications, including Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Quarterly, Teachers College Record, Policy Studies Journal, Urban Education, Educational Policy, Education and Urban Society, Urban Affairs Review, American Experiment Quarterly, American School Board Journal, Phi Delta Kappan, Education Week, and School Administrator. Mr. Hess currently serves as a faculty associate of the Harvard University Program in Education Policy and Governance, on the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, 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, Mr. Hess taught as a professor of education and politics at the University of Virginia and served as a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Marc S. Tucker is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and a leader in the movement for standards-based school reform in the United States. Mr. Tucker authored the 1986 Carnegie Report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, which called for a restructuring of America’s schools based on standards and created the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Mr. Tucker is also credited for developing the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce and for coauthoring its report, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages?, which called for a new high school leaving certificate based on standards. He was instrumental in creating the National Skill Standards Board and served as the chairman of its committee on standards and assessment policy. With Lauren Resnick, Mr. Tucker created the New Standards consortium, which pioneered the development of performance standards in the United States and created a set of examinations matched to the standards. With Ray Marshall, Mr. Tucker coauthored Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations, selected by Business Week as one of the ten best business books of 1992. With Judy Codding, he coauthored Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them (1998), and he coedited The Principal Challenge (2002), also with Judy Codding.