Speaker biographies

Gina Burkhardt is chief executive officer of Learning Point Associates, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization serving the education sector with research, evaluation, and professional services in the school reform and improvement arenas. Her expertise includes leadership, organizational development, systems change, accountability, data management, and comprehensive school improvement. Prior to becoming CEO of Learning Point Associates in 2003, Burkhardt served as executive director of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL). She joined the NCREL staff in 1997 and was executive director from 1999 until 2004. Burkhardt began her career as a middle school mathematics and science teacher in upstate New York. Since then she has held positions in higher education as a researcher and lecturer, and managed school reform projects at regional educational laboratories serving the Southwest and Northeast. She is a member of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, and sits on the board of directors of Knowledge Alliance (formerly the National Education Knowledge Industry Association).

David Driscoll is the commissioner of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A former secondary school mathematics teacher, he was named assistant superintendent of Melrose schools in 1972, and superintendent of schools in the same community in 1984. In 1993, he was appointed Massachusetts deputy commissioner of education. He became interim commissioner of education in 1998, and was named commissioner on March 10, 1999. As deputy commissioner, Driscoll was the principal investigator for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) mathematics and science program in Massachusetts, and was instrumental in 1997 in gaining the NSF’s approval of a second five-year round of funding for this initiative. He was also appointed to oversee the implementation of the state agreement on management and governance of Lawrence public schools. As interim commissioner, Driscoll worked to pass the state’s "12-62 Plan," a law aimed at enhancing future educator quality. As commissioner, Driscoll has overseen the development of the state’s curriculum frameworks, the implementation and expansion of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the development of the state’s School and District Accountability System, and the development and administration of the Educator Certification Test and new licensure regulations.

Joshua Dunn is assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs, where he teaches courses on constitutional law. He has also taught at the College of William & Mary and was a fellow in contemporary history, public policy, and American politics at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia. His research has focused on judicial policymaking, desegregation, and the role of Supreme Court doctrine in shaping remedial decrees. He is the coauthor of a forthcoming book, Complex Justice (UNC Press) on Missouri v. Jenkins, and he coauthors a quarterly column on law and education for Education Next with Martha Derthick.

Michael Feuer is the executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education in the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he was formerly the first director of the Center for Education, and the founding director of the Board on Testing and Assessment. Before joining the NRC in 1993, Feuer was senior analyst and study director at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Feuer previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the Higher Education Finance Research Institute. He then took a faculty position at Drexel University, where he taught courses in economics, public policy, and technology management. He was granted tenure by Drexel in 1986, and was the Burton and Inglis Lecturer at Harvard during the 2004–05 school year. His lectures form the basis of his book, Moderating the Debate: Rationality and the Promise of American Education (Harvard Education Press, 2006). Feuer was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2003 and as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.

Pascal Forgione was named superintendent of the Austin Independent School District by the board of trustees in August 1999. Targeting serious district shortcomings, he immediately undertook new initiatives based upon three priorities: better student achievement, better data, and better collaboration. Over the past seven years, Forgione has built an outstanding education team, developed and implemented an effective education plan, and produced marked improvement in district operations and accomplishments—a key step to restoring community confidence and support. His skills as an educator and educational administrator were developed throughout a successful career in various fields of education. From 1996 until 1999, he was U.S. commissioner of education statistics with the National Center for Education Statistics, and from 1991 to 1996 served as state superintendent for public instruction for the state of Delaware. In 1991, he headed the U. S Department of Education’s National Education Goals Panel.

Lance Fusarelli is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at North Carolina State University. He has authored or edited four books and written more than forty journal articles and book chapters. He coauthored Better Policies, Better Schools: Theories and Applications (Allyn & Bacon, 2004) and recently co-edited The Politics of Leadership: Superintendents and School Boards in Changing Times (Information Age Publishing, 2004). His primary areas of interest focus on superintendents, systemic reform, and the politics of education. His current research centers on implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act and on how school leaders use—and do not use—data to inform decision making.

Dan Goldhaber is a research associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs, and an affiliated scholar of the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center. Goldhaber served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997–2002. 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. 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 effects of the Opportunity Scholarship ("voucher") Program in Florida on schools, teachers, and students; the implementation and impact of comprehensive school reform models; and the effects of National Board Certification.

Jeffrey Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College and a professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author or coauthor of seven books, including Rethinking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor (Princeton, 1994); The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton, 1999), which the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association named the best book written on urban politics in 1999; Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (Kansas, 2001), which the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association named the best book written on urban politics in 2001; and Mayors in the Middle: Race, Politics and Urban School Reform (Princeton, 2004). He is currently completing a book on the controversy surrounding the charter school study by the American Federation of Teachers and its implications for understanding politics, politicization, and the use of research to inform public discourse.

William Howell is an associate professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. In addition to his research on American political institutions, he has written on a wide variety of education policy initiatives, including school vouchers, charter schools, and the No Child Left Behind Act. He is the principal coauthor, with Paul Peterson, of The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings Institution Press, 2002), and editor of Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). He is the deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University; a member of the board of technical advisors for the federal government’s evaluation of the D.C. voucher program; and a co-principal investigator of a multiyear Institute of Education Sciences grant for the Center on School Choice, Accountability, and Achievement.

Richard Ingersoll, a former high school teacher, is currently a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Ingersoll’s research focuses on the management and organization of elementary and secondary schools and the character and problems of the teaching occupation. Over the past decade, he has done extensive research on the problems of teacher shortages and underqualified teachers. His research on these issues has been widely reported in the media and featured in numerous major education reports. Ingersoll has been invited to present his research to numerous federal, state, and local legislators and policymakers. In 2004 he received the Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education for his book Who Controls Teachers’ Work? Power and Accountability in America’s Schools (Harvard University Press, 2003).

James Kim is an assistant professor of education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is a former history teacher in an ethnically diverse middle school, where he served as chair of the history and civics department. His research interests include the use of quantitative methods to assess the effectiveness of compensatory education policies for disadvantaged students, and the impact of reading programs on adolescent learning. He is currently conducting experimental studies of voluntary summer reading, middle school literacy, and teacher professional development in Title I schools.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann is the Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education at Harvard University. In July, she will become a distinguished fellow at the Bard Center, where she will direct the Bard Center for Education and Democracy. A historian of education, Lagemann is a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and president of the Spencer Foundation. She is the author or editor of nine books as well as numerous articles, reviews, reports, and book chapters. She was president of the National Academy of Education and of the History of Education Society; a trustee of the Russell Sage, Greenwall, and Markle Foundations; and a vice chairperson of the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Stanford, California. She is currently co-chairperson of the National Research Council’s Committee on Teacher Preparation and president of the board of Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts.

Reid Lyon is executive vice president for research and evaluation at Higher Ed Holdings and Best Associates’ Whitney International University headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Prior to joining Best Associates, Lyon was a research psychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Before joining the NIH on a full-time basis in l991, Lyon served on the faculties of the University of Alabama–Birmingham (educational psychology and special education), Northwestern University (neuroscience), and the University of Vermont (neurology). Lyon was an advisor to President George W. Bush and Mrs. Bush on child development and education research and policies from 2001 to 2005. Within that context, he was instrumental in ensuring that federal education policies were based on converging scientific research. He has authored, coauthored, or edited over 130 journal articles, books, and chapters addressing learning differences and disabilities in children.

Kathleen McCartney is the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development. She is a developmental psychologist whose research informs theoretical questions on early experience and development as well as policy questions on child care, early childhood education, poverty, and parenting. For the past sixteen years, she has served as a principal investigator on the National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development’s (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care & Youth Development, a study of 1,350 children from birth through sixteen years of age. The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network summarized the findings in Child Care and Child Development (Guilford Press, 2005). Along with Margaret Burchinal and Kristen Bub, McCartney edited Best Practices in Quantitative Methods for Developmentalists, a monograph published by the Society for Research in Child Development in late 2006. McCartney’s work has been informed by her experience as the director of the University of New Hampshire Child Study and Development Center, a laboratory school for children from birth through kindergarten.

Lorraine McDonnell is a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Prior to joining the UCSB faculty, McDonnell was a senior political scientist at RAND for sixteen years, where her research focused on the design and implementation of education policies and their effects on school practice. In her most recent book, Persuasion, Politics, and Educational Testing (Harvard University Press, 2004), she examined the politics of student testing, particularly the curricular and political values underlying state assessment policies. She is a member of the divisional committee for the behavioral, social sciences, and education of the National Research Council (NRC), and was a member of the NRC’s Board on Testing and Assessment for seven years. She has also served on the executive committee of the American Educational Research Association and has chaired its government relations committee.

Michael McPherson is the fifth president of the Spencer Foundation. Prior to joining the foundation in 2003, he served as President of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, for seven years. A nationally known economist whose expertise focuses on the interplay between education and economics, McPherson spent the twenty-two years prior to his Macalester presidency as a professor of economics, chairman of the Economics Department, and dean of faculty at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. McPherson, who is coauthor and editor of several books—including College Access: Opportunity or Privilege? Keeping College Affordable (Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006) and Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1996)—was founding co-editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy. He has been a trustee of the College Board, the American Council on Education, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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 George W. 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.

Roberto Rodriguez is a senior education adviser to Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. His duties include legislative, policy, budget, and appropriations work on a variety of education issues, including early education and elementary and secondary education. Among those issues, he focuses on the No Child Left Behind Act, Head Start, child care, and the education of special populations. Before working on the Senate committee, Mr. Rodriguez was a senior education specialist at the National Council for La Raza (NCLR), where he engaged in applied research and policy analysis of federal and state education reform issues, and facilitated the development and evaluation of NCLR’s community-based education programs.

Andrew Rotherham is co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank, and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. He also writes the blog Eduwonk.com. Rotherham also serves on the Virginia Board of Education, a position he was appointed to by Governor Mark Warner in 2005. During the Clinton administration, Rotherham served at the White House as special assistant to the president for domestic policy. He is the author of numerous articles and papers about education, and co-editor of three books on educational policy, including Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today’s Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2006). He serves on advisory boards and committees for a variety of organizations, including the American Academy for Liberal Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. He is a trustee of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy, and a member of the boards of directors for the Charter School Leadership Council and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Andrew Rudalevige is associate professor of political science at Dickinson College, where he has taught since 2000. In 2004–05 he was a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. His research interests include the presidency, executive branch management, interbranch relations, and public policy processes. He previously worked in the Massachusetts State Senate and served a term as an elected city councilor in his hometown of Watertown, Massachusetts. His first book, Managing the President’s Program (Princeton, 2002), won the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award. He is currently researching and writing a book on the politics of policy implementation, centered on the No Child Left Behind Act.

Warren Simmons is executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. The institute’s mission is to generate, share, and act on knowledge that improves the conditions and outcomes of schooling in America, especially in urban communities and in schools serving disadvantaged children. The institute provides technical assistance and support to several multisite urban education reform initiatives focused on high school transformation, central office redesign, and K–12 improvements in teaching and learning. Before joining the institute in 1998, Simmons was executive director of the Philadelphia Education Fund, where he supported district-wide efforts to enact standards-based reform. Simmons serves on the boards of several national and local education organizations, including the Public Education Network, PLATO Learning, Inc., Homes for Working Families, the Merck Institute, the National Center on Education and the Economy, and the Campaign for Educational Equity.

Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst was appointed in 2002 to a six-year term as the first director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The institute includes the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Special Education Research. Whitehurst previously served as U.S. assistant secretary for educational research and improvement. Prior to beginning federal service, he was leading professor of psychology and pediatrics, and chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. During his academic career, Whitehurst published five books and more than a hundred research papers on language and reading readiness in children. He developed programs for enhancing children’s language development that are widely used in preschool programs in the United States and other countries.

Kenneth Wong is the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy and the director of Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University. He is also a professor of education, political science, and public policy at Brown. He was the founding director of the federally funded National Center on School Choice, Competition, and Student Achievement. He is nationally known for his research in the politics of education, policy innovation, outcome-based accountability, and governance redesign. His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, the Spencer Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the British Council, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has advised the U.S. Congress, state legislature, and governors’ and mayoral offices, and has provided leadership in several large urban school systems on how to redesign their accountability frameworks. He is currently co-editor of a major educational policy journal, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

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