Dominic J. Brewer is a labor economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy at the University of Southern California (USC). Before joining USC in 2005, he was a vice president at RAND Corporation, directing RAND's education policy research program for more than five years. Mr. Brewer has overseen major projects focusing on educational productivity and teacher issues in both K-12 and higher education. He has published more than fifty academic journal articles, book chapters, and monographs, including a book on competition in higher education, In Pursuit of Prestige: Strategy and Competition in U.S. Higher Education (Transaction, 2001), which he coauthored with Susan M. Gates and Charles A. Goldman. Mr. Brewer's work on class size includes a review of the research literature published in Scientific American and a report for the U.S. Congress on the costs of class size reduction under different policy designs. He has been an adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a professor of policy at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He was an associate editor of economics for Education Review for many years and is a frequent reviewer for federal agencies and foundations. He holds courtesy appointments in the USC College Department of Economics and in the School of Policy Planning and Development.

Thomas S. Dee is a professor of economics at Swarthmore College. He is currently a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, concentrating on programs on children, the economics of education, and health economics. Mr. Dee was also a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2003, and until 2005 he was a scholar at the National Young Faculty Leaders Forum at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Educational Research Association, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the National Tax Association, and the Southern Economic Association.

Michael Feinberg is cofounder of the Knowledge Is Power Program Foundation (KIPP) and superintendent of KIPP, Inc. As a Teach For America alumnus, he began KIPP in 1994 with Dave Levin and established KIPP Academy Houston a year later. He has received numerous awards, including Houston's Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service, the Seed of Freedom Award, and the Heritage Foundation's Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship. KIPP has been featured in numerous media publications and is now a network of thirty-eight high-performing public schools, serving over 6,000 students in fifteen states and the District of Columbia.

Jennifer de Forest is an assistant professor of education foundations, leadership, and policy at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. Previously, Ms. de Forest was a high school history teacher and served as a history department chair. She has served on the board of the Grant Selection Committee at the Jack Cooke Kent Foundation and the Rhodes Scholar and Marshall Scholar Nomination Committee at the University of Virginia. Ms. de Forest is a member of the History of Education Society, the American Educational Research Association, the American Society of Higher Education, the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and the Association for Research on NonProfit Organizations and Voluntary Associations.

Dan Goldhaber is a professor of public affairs at the University of Washington, an affiliated scholar at the Urban Institute, and a senior nonresident fellow at Education Sector. He served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997 to 2002. His work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level and the relationship between teacher labor markets and teacher quality. Mr. Goldhaber's current research addresses teacher labor markets and the role that teacher pay structure plays in teacher recruitment and retention; the relationship between teacher licensure test performance and student achievement; the stability of teacher effectiveness measures over time; the influence of human resource practices on teacher turnover and quality; and the role of community colleges in higher education.

Jay P. Greene is an endowed chair and head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Mr. Greene conducts research and writes about education policy, including topics such as school choice, high school graduation rates, accountability, and special education. His research was cited four times in the Supreme Court's opinions in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case on school vouchers. His articles have appeared in policy journals such as The Public Interest, City Journal, and Education Next; in academic journals such as The Georgetown Public Policy Review, Education and Urban Society, and The British Journal of Political Science; and in major newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Mr. Greene is the author of Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Mr. Greene has previously been a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston, as well as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Brian A. Jacob is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and a professor of economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an executive committee member of the National Poverty Center. He has previously served as a policy analyst in the New York City mayor's office and taught middle school in East Harlem. Mr. Jacob's primary fields of interest are labor economics, program evaluation, and the economics of education. His current research focuses on urban school reform and teacher labor markets. In recent work, he has examined school choice, education accountability programs, housing vouchers, and teacher labor markets.

Thomas Kane is a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Project for Policy Innovation in Education, a new program that partners with states and districts to evaluate innovative policies. His work has influenced thought on a range of education policies: test score volatility, the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions, and the economic payoff to a community college. From 1995 to 1996, Mr. Kane served as the senior staff economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within the Clinton administration's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 to 2000, Mr. Kane was a faculty member at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution.

Susanna Loeb is an associate professor of education at Stanford University, specializing in the economics of education and the relationship between schools and federal, state, and local policies. She studies resource allocation, looking specifically at how teachers' preferences and teacher preparation policies affect the distribution of teaching quality across schools and how the structure of state finance systems affects the level and distribution of funds to districts. She also studies poverty policies, including welfare reform and early-childhood education programs. Ms. Loeb is an associate professor of business (by courtesy) at Stanford and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bridget Terry Long is an associate professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As an economist specializing in education, Ms. Long studies the transition from high school to higher education and beyond. Her work has focused on college access and choice, factors that influence college student outcomes, and the behavior of postsecondary institutions. Her past projects have examined the effects of financial aid programs, the impact of postsecondary remediation, and the influence of class size and faculty characteristics on student persistence. Her current projects include an aid simplification study, analysis of the growing gender gap in college enrollment, and an examination of the expansion of student loans. She is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a visiting scholar with the New England Public Policy Center at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. She received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and has been awarded numerous research grants from organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Ford Foundation.

Rob Reich is an associate professor of political science, ethics in society, and education at Stanford University. He is working on two projects--the first about ethics, public policy, and philanthropy and the second about the ideals of equality and adequacy as applied to education policy and reform. He is the author of Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago, 2002), coauthor of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It (Brookings, 2005), and coeditor of the forthcoming Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin. He has received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Mr. Reich was a recipient of the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and is the founder and codirector of the Stanford Summer Philosophy Discovery Institute.

Michelle Rhee is the chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools and a national expert in urban education. Previously, she served as president and CEO of The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization that works with school districts, state departments of education, and other educational entities to improve their ability to recruit, select, train, and support new teachers for difficult-to-staff schools. In 1992, Ms. Rhee began her career at Harlem Park Community School as a member of Teach For America. Her outstanding success in the classroom earned her acclaim on Good Morning America and The Home Show, as well as in the Wall Street Journal and the Hartford Courant.

Jon Schnur was a policy adviser on K-12 education in the Clinton administration. He served as the White House associate director for educational policy, former vice president Gore's senior policy adviser on education, and special assistant to former U.S. secretary of education Richard Riley. In 2000, Mr. Schnur cofounded New Leaders for New Schools, of which he is now CEO.

Stefanie Sanford serves as the deputy director of U.S. program policy and finance for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before joining the foundation, she was deputy director of policy for Texas governor Rick Perry, managing the policy development process and advising on legislation related to educational technology, e-government, higher education, workforce development, and biotechnology. She has served as policy adviser to the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and to the state attorney general. Ms. Sanford was also a White House fellow in the Office of Cabinet Affairs. She is active in numerous advisory committees and educational groups, including the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the Annette Strauss Center for Civic Participation, and the Aspen Institute.

Kim Smith is cofounder and senior adviser of NewSchools Venture Fund, which she established in 1998 to transform public education by supporting education entrepreneurs. Ms. Smith began her career as a consultant specializing in business-education partnerships. In 1989, she became a founding team member of Teach For America. She then served as founding director of BAYAC AmeriCorps, a consortium of nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area working to develop young leaders in education. Ms. Smith has worked in marketing for Silicon Graphics' Education Industry Group, where she focused on the online learning industry, and as the founding director of a trade show venture. She has also served on many education venture and advisory boards, including EdVoice, the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the Stanford University School of Education.

Christopher B. Swanson is the director of the EPE Research Center, a division of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Weekly. Prior to joining EPE, Mr. Swanson was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, where his work focused on issues of federal policy and urban high school reform. Over the past few years, Mr. Swanson has examined the implication accountability of the No Child Left Behind Act and served on multiple advisory panels, including the National Governors Association, the Council of the Chief State School Officers, and the Alliance for Excellent Education. He has also contributed chapters to several recent and forthcoming edited volumes: Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis (Harvard Education, 2004), No Child Left Behind and the Reduction of the Achievement Gap (Routledge, 2007), and Reflections on the Social Organization of Schooling: A Tribute to Charles E. Bidwell (Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming).

Rajiv Vinnakota is cofounder and managing director of the SEED Foundation, which opened the nation's first urban boarding school for disadvantaged students. Prior to founding SEED, Mr. Vinnakota was an associate at Mercer Management Consulting, where he worked on strategic and financial projects in a variety of industries. He is also an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and a trustee at Princeton University. Mr. Vinnakota serves on the board of The Empower Program, which works with youth to end the culture of violence. He was named Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine and has received the Oprah Winfrey Show's Use Your Life Award, among other honors.

Martin West is an assistant professor in education, political science, and public policy at Brown University and the research editor of Education Next. He previously was a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Mr. West is coeditor of No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability (Brookings, 2003) and School Money Trials: The Legal Pursuit of Educational Adequacy (Brookings, 2007). He has written numerous articles and papers on education policy and politics.

Patrick J. Wolf holds the endowed chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas. He is the principal investigator of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program impact evaluation and the School Choice Demonstration Project. Mr. Wolf is lead editor of Educating Citizens: International Perspective on Civic Values and School Choice (Brookings, 2004) and a contributing author to The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings, 2002). In addition, he has authored or coauthored more than two dozen articles and book chapters on school choice, special education, public management, and campaign finance. He was a member of the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education and previously taught at Columbia University and Georgetown University.