Alan S. Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies, which he founded in 1990. He is a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bretton Woods Committee, and a former governor of the American Stock Exchange. Blinder has had an extensive role in governmental policy. He served as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1994 to 1996 and as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1994, where he was in charge of the administration’s macroeconomic forecasting and worked on pressing budget, international trade, and health care issues. Blinder is a columnist for The New York Times Sunday business section and appears frequently on PBS, CNBC, CNN, and Bloomberg TV.
Sean P. Corcoran is assistant professor of Educational Economics at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and is an affiliated faculty of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. His research focuses on the economics of school funding, the political economy of school choice, and the labor market for elementary and secondary school teachers. Corcoran is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 2005 to 2006. His recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Urban Economics, and American Economic Review.
Robert M. Costrell is professor of Education Reform and Economics and holds the Endowed Chair in Education Accountability at the University of Arkansas. His academic career has featured seminal publications on the economic theory of educational standards and teacher pensions, as well as publications on school finance litigation. Costrell has an extensive background in policymaking. From 1999 to 2006, he served in major policy roles for three governors of Massachusetts, including policy research director, chief economist, and education advisor to Governor Mitt Romney. He represented the administration on the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission from 2001 to 2003.He also serves on the National Technical Advisory Council for No Child Left Behind, appointed by Secretary Spellings.
Michael M. DeArmond is a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, Bothell, and a doctoral student in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Washington. His research interests include teacher labor markets and the reform of district-level operations. His recent work has focused on teacher pensions and the reform of school district human resource practices. DeArmond is a former middle-school history teacher.
Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues, and his work on efficiency, resource use, and economic outcomes of schools has frequently entered into the design of both national and international educational policy. His analysis measuring teacher quality through student achievement forms the basis for current research into the value added of teachers and schools. His most recent book, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses, describes how improved school finance policies can be used to meet our achievement goals. He has produced 15 books along with numerous widely cited articles in professional journals. He served as deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Frederick M. Hess is director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an educator, political scientist, and author. His influential books include Spinning Wheels, Revolution at the Margins, and Common Sense School Reform. His work has appeared in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Urban Affairs Review, and major media outlets such as the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, and National Review. A former high school social studies teacher, he has taught education and policy at universities including Georgetown, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as executive editor of Education Next, a faculty associate with Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and on the board of directors for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education.
Paul T. Hill is the John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of Washington, Bothell. He directs the Center on Re-Inventing Public Education, which studies alternative governance, financing, human resource, and accountability systems for public elementary and secondary education. He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governmental Studies Program and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. Hill’s recent work has focused on reform of public elementary and secondary education, reform of school finance, and school choice. He chaired Brookings’ National Working Commission on Choice in K–12 Education and wrote its report, School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference. Among his books are It Takes a City: Getting Serious about Urban School Reform and Fixing Urban Schools, both written as resources for mayors and community leaders facing the need to transform failing big-city school systems.
Richard W. Johnson, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, is an economist specializing in health and income security at older ages. Much of his research centers on older Americans’ employment and retirement decisions. His recent studies include analyses of the recession’s impact on older workers, occupational change at older ages, changes over time in job demands, and work disincentives created by the tax and transfer system. He has also written extensively about retirement preparedness, including studies of the financial and health risks people face as they approach retirement and the costs of acute and long-term care. He is currently completing a book on older workers for the Urban Institute Press.
Joel I. Klein has served as chancellor of New York City schools since 2002, overseeing more than 1,500 schools with 1.1 million students. Previously, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Bertelsmann, Inc. From 1997 to 2001, Klein was assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division. His appointment to the U.S. Justice Department came after he served as deputy counsel to President Clinton from 1993 to 1995. Klein has had a long-standing interest in educational issues: he studied at New York University’s School of Education and later taught mathematics to 6th-graders at a public school in Queens. He has served as a visiting and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and has published several articles in leading scholarly and popular journals.
David H. Monk is professor of educational administration and dean of the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Before this, he was a member of the Cornell University faculty for 20 years. He was the inaugural coeditor of Education Finance and Policy, the journal of the American Education Finance Association, and serves on its editorial board along with those of the Journal of Education Finance, Educational Policy, and Journal of Research in Rural Education. Monk specializes in education finance, educational productivity, and the organizational structuring of schools and school districts. He wrote Educational Finance: An Economic Approach and Raising Money for Education: A Guide to the Property Tax (with Brian O. Brent) and has published numerous articles in leading scholarly journals including Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Education Finance, Economics of Education Review, and Education and Urban Society.
Michael J. Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he served as department chair from 1995 to 2005. His research focuses on the economics of education. He has published many articles in the area, with a primary focus on teacher labor markets and teacher compensation. He serves on the board of editors for Education Finance and Policy and the Peabody Journal of Education and on the advisory boards of various statistical agencies and research institutes. He is co-investigator at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the Urban Institute and the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, two national research centers funded by the Institute on Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education.
Jennifer King Rice is a professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on education productivity, cost analysis in education, and educational reform for at-risk students. Her current work focuses on teachers as a critical resource in education and addresses the costs of enhancing teacher quality through effective recruitment, retention, and professional development strategies, particularly in difficult-to-staff schools. Rice’s work has appeared in leading journals including Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Economics of Education Review, and Journal of Education Finance as well as in multiple edited volumes. She wrote Fiscal Policy in Urban Education and High Stakes Accountability: Implications for Resources and Capacity. As a national expert in education finance and policy, Dr. Rice regularly consults with policy research organizations, including The Economic Policy Institute and The Finance Project, and with state and federal organizations.
Steven G. Rivkin is professor of economics and chair of the Department of Economics at Amherst College, associate director of Research with the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, and a fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the Town of Amherst (MA) School Committee. His research centers on the economics and sociology of education. Rivkin has written extensively on teacher quality, teacher labor markets, class size effects, school spending, and school desegregation and has written studies on the effectiveness of charter schools and parental responsiveness to charter school quality, special education, student mobility, peer influences, and the effects of air pollution on absenteeism.
Andrew J. Rotherham is co-founder and publisher of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank. He also writes the blog Eduwonk. com, which an Education Week study cited as among the most influential information sources in education today, as well as a regular column for U.S. News and World Report. Rotherham previously served at The White House as special assistant to the president for Domestic Policy during the Clinton administration and is a former member of the Virginia Board of Education. He is the author of more than 100 articles, book chapters, papers, and op-eds about education policy and politics and is the author or editor of four books on educational policy. Rotherham is a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council and serves on advisory boards and committees for various organizations, including The Broad Foundation, Harvard University, and the National Governors Association.
Kathryn L. Shaw is the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. She served as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1999 to 2001 and is a previous editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. Shaw’s recent research focuses on managing talent in high-performance organizations. She studies how firms attract and build star talent in a range of knowledge-intensive industries and how companies can achieve measurable rates of return from investing in effective human resource management practices. She is a codeveloper of “insider econometrics,” in which researchers use internal company data to study the performance gains from such practices as teamwork and incentive pay. Her work has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Rand Journal of Economics, and Journal of Political Economy.
Randi Weingarten is president of the more than 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. She was elected following 11 years of service as an AFT vice president. In September 2008, Weingarten led the development of the AFT Innovation Fund, an initiative to support sustainable, innovative, and collaborative reform projects developed by members and their local unions to strengthen public schools. She is the former president of the United Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2, representing approximately 228,000 nonsupervisory educators in the New York City public school system. Weingarten is currently cochair of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization for the city’s 100-plus public-sector unions, including those representing higher education and other public service employees.
Patrick M. Wright is the William J. Conaty GE Professor of Strategic Human Resources in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research in strategic human resource management, with a particular focus on how human resource practices, the human resource function, and human resource leaders can affect firm performance. A prolific author, he has written more than 60 publications and has contributed to more than 15 books and volumes. Wright has served on the board of directors for Human Resource Planning Society, World at Work, and the Society for Human Resource Foundation. He has served as a distinguished academic visitor for the Ministry of Manpower in Singapore, as a senior research fellow in Taiwan, and currently holds a secondary position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands as a senior research fellow.
