Alan D. Bersin is Superintendent of Public Education for San Diego City Schools.  Previously, he served as a United States Attorney for the Southern District of California.  As Superintendent, Mr. Bersin launched a major reorganization of the district to focus its resources strategically on instruction to improve student achievement and to modernize its business infrastructure to support teaching and learning in the classroom.  Governor Gray Davis appointed Mr. Bersin to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing in April 2000, and upon selection by his colleagues, he served two years as Chairman of the Commission.  Mr. Bersin was previously a senior partner with the Los Angeles law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson.  He holds an A.B in government from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Dan Corley is Founder and Head of the Community Preparatory School for grades three through eight in South Providence, RI.  Founded in 1984, Community Prep has become a model in urban education acclaimed by The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Wall Street Journal.  Ninety-seven percent of the school’s graduates have been accepted into college preparatory high school programs, and 81 percent—more than twice the urban public-school average—are attending college.  Community Prep is built around rigorous academics, a teaching style that instills values and self-esteem, community service and family support.  Before founding Community Prep, Mr. Corley devoted himself to community service as a VISTA volunteer, a worker in a homeless shelter, and a teacher at a school for delinquent boys.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is a 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.  He is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Education and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.  From 1981 until 2002, Mr. Finn was Professor of Education and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.  Mr. Finn is the author of over 300 articles published in scholarly journals and other periodicals, such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He has also published 13 books, most recently Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, co-edited with Andrew Rotherham and Charles Hokanson (2001).  Mr. Finn serves on the boards of several education-related organizations.  He holds a doctorate in Education Policy from Harvard University.

Robert W. Hahn is Executive Director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Previously, he has worked for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Hahn frequently contributes to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Economic Review, Yale Law Journal and Science. Recently, he is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI-Brookings, 2000) and editor of High-Stakes Antitrust (AEI-Brookings, 2003). In addition, Mr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School––an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

Jane Hannaway is Director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute.  She is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the study of educational organizations.  Her recent research focuses on structural reforms in education, particularly reforms promoting accountability, competition and choice.  Ms. Hannaway previously served on the faculty of Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford Universities.  She also has been a senior researcher with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE).  Ms. Hannaway is the author or co-author of four books and numerous papers in education and management journals.  She recently completed her term as vice president of the American Educational Research Association and also served on its Executive Board.  She is the immediate past editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Frederick M. Hess is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Executive Editor of Education Next.  Dr. Hess’s most recent books are Revolution at the Margins (Brookings, 2002) and Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave, forthcoming 2004).  His scholarship has appeared in publications including Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Quarterly, Phi Delta Kappan, and Education Week.  Dr. Hess is a faculty associate of the Harvard University Program in Education Policy and Governance and currently serves on the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education.  A former high school teacher, Dr. Hess holds a M.Ed. in Education and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.  Prior to joining AEI, Dr. Hess was a professor at the University of Virginia and a Senior Fellow with the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Honorable Eugene W. Hickok is the United States Acting Deputy Secretary and  Under Secretary of Education, formally nominated as Under Secretary by President Bush on March 30, 2001.  Prior to his appointment, Dr. Hickok was Secretary of Education for the state of Pennsylvania, where he implemented sweeping reforms to raise standards and accountability, to expand the use of education technology, and to promote charter public schools, among other reforms. He also served on the boards of trustees of Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities, and on the State System of Higher Education’s Board of Governors.  Dr. Hickok is a founding member and chairman of the Education Leaders Council.  He taught for 15 years at Dickinson College and has published numerous books and articles.

Tom Loveless is Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and Senior Fellow in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution.  He has recently published articles in the Wilson Quarterly, Education Next, and other journals, and op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals.  He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and Fox News.  The author of The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 1999) and editor of four additional books, Mr. Loveless is both a former classroom teacher and a former assistant and associate professor of public policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.  He sits on the advisory boards of the American Journal of Education and of a Massachusetts Charter School.

William Ouchi is Professor of Management at the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.  He has served at UCLA since 1979, leaving during 1993-95 to serve first as Advisor and then Chief of Staff to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.  Mr. Ouchi is Chairman of the Anderson School’s Riordan Programs, which encourage individuals (high school age through post-baccalaureate) to consider careers in business and to seek graduate-level education opportunities.  He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Chicago, and is the author of numerous scholarly articles and several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Theory Z: How American Management Can Meet the Japanese Challenges, and a new book (with Lydia G. Segal) entitled Making Schools Work (Simon and Schuster, 2003). 

David Schoenbrod is Professor of Law at the New York Law School and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.  His recent scholarship focuses on government officials and public interest advocates exercising power in ways that evade accountability to voters.  In addition to publishing in scholarly journals and contributing to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and other newspapers, Mr. Schoenbrod is the author of Power without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People through Delegation (Yale, 1993) and the co-author, with Ross Sandler, of Democracy by Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government (Yale, 2003). During the 1970’s, as a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mr. Schoenbrod helped lead the effort to remove lead from gasoline.

Deborah Wadsworth joined Public Agenda in 1986 and served as President until her retirement in September 2003.  She currently serves as a Board Member and Senior Advisor to Public Agenda.  For 18 years, Ms. Wadsworth was the spokesperson for Public Agenda on issues of national concern.  She has written extensively on contemporary issues that are the focus of Public Agenda research and is called upon regularly to speak before Congressional committees, business groups, major policy organizations, and think tanks.  Prior to joining Public Agenda, she was Executive Director of the Smart Family Foundation, Program Officer of the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, and Director of Admissions at the State University of New York at Purchase.  She holds degrees from Wellesley College and Columbia University.