Beth Almeida

National Institute on Retirement Security

Almeida is the executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS). NIRS is a non-profit research institute based in Washington, established to promote informed policymaking in the retirement arena by fostering a deep understanding of the value of pension plans to employers, employees, and the economy as a whole. NIRS conducts research, education, and outreach programs that are national in scope.

Before joining NIRS, she served as assistant director for strategic resources and as senior economist with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, where she was instrumental in transitioning some 40,000 airline employees out of terminating or freezing pensions into the IAM’s multiemployer defined benefit pension plan. She has authored numerous economic and pension publications and is a frequent speaker at domestic and international conferences. Ms. Almeida earned a bachelor’s degree in international business from Lehigh University and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She sits on the executive board of the Labor and Employment Relations Association and on the Advisory Board of the Center for Retirement Research’s initiative on state and local government pensions at Boston College.

Dale Ballou

Vanderbilt University

Dale Ballou earned a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1989. From 1989 to 2002 he taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In 2002 he joined the faculty of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University. He has done research on the role of regulations and incentives in the training, recruitment, and retention of teachers. His book, Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality, co-authored with Michael Podgursky, was published by the Upjohn Institute in 1997.

Professor Ballou’s recent research focuses on educational assessment and accountability systems. He has been a participant on professional conferences on accountability and assessment at Havard University, the RAND Institute, and the University of Maryland, and has served as a consultant to research organizations and practitioners in Pennsylvania, Houston, Los Angeles, Ohio, and Louisiana. His work with William Sanders and Paul Wright of the SAS Institute appeared in a special 2004 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Studies devoted to value-added assessment.

Dominic Brewer

University of Southern California

Dr. Brewer is Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Affairs and the Clifford H. and Betty C. Allen Professor in Urban Leadership at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. He is a labor economist specializing in the economics of education and education policy. Before joining USC in 2005 he was a Vice President at RAND Corp., directing RAND’s education policy research program for more than five years. Dr. Brewer has overseen major projects focusing on educational productivity and teacher issues in both K-12 and higher education, and published more than 50 academic economics and education journal articles, book chapters and monographs. His publications include a book on competition in higher education, In Pursuit of Prestige, and multiple articles in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and others. His 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 co-led the state-sponsored evaluation of California’s charter schools (Charter School Operations and Performance: Evidence from California, 2003) and is one of the authors of Rhetoric Versus Reality: What We Know and What We Need to Know about Vouchers and Charter Schools (2001). Dr. Brewer most recently spearheaded RAND’s effort to assist in major K-12 reform in the State of Qatar, the centerpiece of which is a system of charter-like government funded schools; a book detailing this effort, Education for a New Era, was published in 2007.

Dr. Brewer holds a B.A. in Philosophy Politics, and Economics from Oxford, a Masters in Economics from Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Labor Economics from Cornell. He has been an adjunct Professor of Economics at UCLA and a Professor of Policy at the RAND Graduate School. He was an associate director of Economics of Education Review and will be coeditor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 2010-2012. He is a coeditor of the economics section of the International Encyclopedia of Education.

Kristine Brown

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kristine Brown is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a Ph.D. in Economics with a specialization in labor and public finance from the University of California, Berkley. The aim of her research is to better understand how the structure of retirement benefits affects the employment decisions of older workers. In recent work she exploited reforms of the California teachers’ retirement program to investigate the relationship between pension financial incentives and retirement timing. She is currently extending this work to estimate the impact of teacher pension reforms on student achievement.

Robert L. Clark

North Carolina State University

Robert Clark is Professor of Economics and Professor of Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University. Professor Clark has conducted research examining retirement decisions, the choice between defined benefit and defined contribution plans, the impact of pension conversions to defined contribution and cash balance plans, the role of information and communications on 401(k) contributions, government regulations of pensions, and Social Security. He has examined the economic responses to population aging in developed countries and has written widely on international retirement plans, especially the Social Security and employer pension systems in Japan.

Professor Clark has also been engaged in a variety of projects assessing the key issues in the economics of higher education and the future of higher education in North Carolina. Professor Clark is a Fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, and a member of the American Economic Association, the Gerontological Society of America, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. He also is a Governor of the Foundation for Methods that was appointed by the U.S. Social Security Administration to review and evaluate the annual projects of the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance program. Professor Clark earned a B.A. from Millsaps College and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.

Robert M. Costrell

University of Arkansas

Robert M. Costrell is Professor of Education Reform and Economics and holds the Endowed Chair in Education Accountability at the University of Arkansas. His areas of expertise include standards-based reform, school finance, and teacher pensions. Professor Costrell has both an academic and policy-making background. He was a member of the economics department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1978 to 2006. His academic career has featured seminal publications on the economic theory of educational standards, as well as the theory of income distribution and testing. These have appeared in the top economics journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. He has also written on educational policy and finance for general audiences in journals such as Brookings Papers on Education Policy and Education Next.

From 1999 to 2006, Dr. Costrell served in major policy roles for three governors of Massachusetts, including policy research director and chief economist. He worked closely with the governors and the commissioner of education throughout this critical period, when Massachusetts’ accountability reforms, based on exit exams, went into effect. As education advisor to Governor Mitt Romney, he helped develop the governor’s comprehensive education reform proposal of 2005, and also led the reforms of the state’s district funding formula adopted in 2006 and charter funding formula in 2004. In 2003, Dr. Costrell’s extensive expert testimony in Massachusetts’ school finance case (Hancock v. Driscoll) proved critical to the successful defense of that state’s education reform program. He represented the adminstration ont he Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (2001-03) and the Massachusetts School Building Authority (2005-06).

Dr. Costrell has served on the Steering Committee to develop an economics assessment for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2001-02), and the U.S. Department of Education’s Advisory Council on Education Statistics, appointed by Secretary Paige (2001-02). In 2008, he was appointed by Secretary Spellings to serve on the National Technical Advisory Council for NCLB.

Professor Costrell joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas in August 2006. His current research topics include teacher pension policy, fiscal impact of school choice, longitudinal analysis of student achievement, and the methodologies for school funding estimation. Professor Costrell received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1978 and his B.A. in economics from the University of Michigan in 1972.

Lee Craig

North Carolina State University

Dr. Lee A. Craig is Alumni Distinguished Professor of economics at North Carolina State University. Professor Craig has published more than 70 books, scholarly articles, chapters, and reviews on these and related topics. His recent research has focused on the history of the newspaper business, public-sector pensions and finance, and the history of nutrition and health. In addition to his appointment at N.C. State, Professor Craig has been a research fellow and research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1991-2004). He is a trustee of both the Economic History Association and the Cliometric Society. He is also a former fellow of the Center for Demographic Studies at Duke University (1991-94) and the Seminar fur Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Universitat Munchen, Germany (1996). Professor Craig has been a visiting professor of economics at Duke University, and has lectured and given seminars at universities and colleges around the world. In addition, Professor Craig is a former winner of the Allan Nevins Prize (1989). His also a former winner of an N.C. State Outstanding Teacher Award (2001) and has been the N.C. State College of Management’s nominee for the University of North Carolina Board of Governor’s Teacher Award (2003-04). He is a member of the North Carolina Academy of Outstanding Teachers.

Professor Craig received his B.S. and M.A. degrees from Ball State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. Since coming to N.C. State in 1989, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in microeconomics and economic and business history.

Michael DeArmond

Center on Reinventing Public Education

Michael DeArmond is a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. His work focuses on the teacher labor market and the reform of district-level operations. Mr. DeArmond’s published work includes studies of teacher shortages and teacher compensation, as well as te reform of district human resource departments and district real estate management practices. Mr. DeArmond holds an MPA in Social and Education Policy from the University of Washington.

Mark Ehlert

University of Missouri-Columbia

Mark Ehlert is a research analyst in the Economics Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Ehlert has worked extensively with institution- and state-level data to conduct research and evaluation on K-12, higher education, and employment and training systems. He has participated in numerous program evaluations and research studies utilizing both primary data and state-wide administrative data sets. Dr. Ehlert assisted in designing and conducting a multi-site and multi-state evaluation of the Successful Schools Program, a school reform effort initiated by the Ewing-Marion Kauffman Foundation. He is also a member of an evaluation team that has studied implementation and outcomes associated with a multi-project professional development program in Missouri. Some of his other recent research includes analyses of the eligibility and distribution of financial aid in Missouri colleges and universities; examining the predictive ability of Missouri’s high-school proficiency test on the college-going rates and performance of high-school graduates; evaluation school-level and individual-level outcomes associated with Missouri’s A+ Schools program; and evaluating outcomes from and participation the state’s workforce development system. Dr. Ehlert received his doctorate in comprehensive vocational education in 1998.

Jon Forman

University of Oklahoma

Professor Jonathan B. Forman teaches individual income tax, corporate tax, pension and health care benefits, and elder law at the University of Oklahoma (OU). Forman is also Vice Chair of the board of trustees of the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS). Prior to joining OU in 1985, Forman was an attorney and editor of Tax Notes in Arlington, VA. He began his law career in 1978 as a law clerk for Judge Robert J. Yock of the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 1983, he served as a trial attorney int he Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1983-84, he was tax counsel for U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Forman is the author of Making America Work, and he has more than 150 other publications. In addition to his many scholarly publications, Forman has a monthly column with the Journal Record newspaper of Oklahoma City, and he has published op-eds in Barron’s, the Dallas Morning News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Washington Times, the Daily Oklahoman, Pensions & Investments, and Tax Notes. Forman was a founding member of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities (2001-03), and he was a delegate to the 1998 and 2002 National Summits on Retirement Savings. Forman has also testified before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Advisory Council on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefit Plans, and the Oklahoma Legislature.

Forman was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1978 and to the Oklahoma Bar in 2003. He is active in the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools, and he served as a member of the board of trustees of the American Tax Policy Institute from 1998-2003. Forman is also a fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel, a fellows program associate of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, the National Tax Association, and the American Economic Association.

Leora Friedberg

University of Virginia

Leora Friedberg is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a TIAA-CREF Institute Fellow. She has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Institute, the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, and the International Longevity Center-USA; as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and as an Aging and Health Economics Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Friedberg’s fields of interest are public and labor economics. Her research has focused on retirement and saving behavior of older Americans, including papers on the Social Security earnings test, the causes and consequences of the ongoing shift in pension structure, and the impact of bargaining between spouses on retirement saving. Friedberge received her Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University.

Dan Goldhaber

University of Washington and The Urban Institute

Dan Goldhaber is a Research Professor at the University of Washington and an Affiliated Scholar of the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center. Professor Goldhaber also served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997-2002. Professor Goldhaber’s research focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level and the relationship between teacher labor markets and teacher quality. Topics of published work in these areas include studies of the effects of teacher qualifications and quality on student achievement; the impact of teacher pay structure and licensure on the teacher labor market; the relative efficiency of public and private schools; and the effects of accountability systems and market competition on K-12 schooling.

Jay Greene

University of Arkansas

Jay P. Greene is endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 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 Education Finance and Policy, Economics of Education Review, and the British Journal of Political Science, as well as in major newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Jay Greene is the author of Education Myths (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). He has been a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston. He received his B.A. in history from Tufts University in 1988 and his Ph.D. from the Government Department at Harvard University in 1995.

James W. Guthrie

Vanderbilt University

James W. Guthrie is a professor of public policy and education, chair of the Leadership, Policy, and Organizations department, and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He instructs both undergraduate and graduate courses, and conducts research on education policy and finance.

Professor Guthrie is founder and chairman of the board of Management Analysis & Planning, Inc. (MAP), a private sector management consulting firm specializing in public finance and litigation support. MAP offices are located in Davis, California. He has been a consultant to the governments of Armenia, Australia, Chile, Guyana, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Romania, and South Africa, and has had extensive experience in consulting for The World Bank, UNESCO, and the Organization of American States.

He is the author or co-author of ten books, and more than 200 professional and scholarly articles. He is past president of the American Education Finance Association, served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of American Education, published in 2002, and is series editor of the ten-volume Peabody Education Leadership Series. He is principal investigator for the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, a federally-funded research center concentrating on the study of educator performance incentives.

Previously a professor at the University of California, Berkley for 27 years, he holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and undertook postdoctoral study in public finance at Harvard. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford Brookes College, Oxford, England, and the Irving R. Melbo Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California.

Jane Hannaway

The Urban Institute

Jane Hannaway is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the study of educational organizations. She is founding Director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. and part of the Institute’s senior management team. Dr. Hannaway is also the director of a federally funded research center, CALDER (Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research), focused on analyses of state longitudinal student and teacher level administrative data bases, particularly analyses associated with teacher labor markets. Much of her recent research has focused on structural reforms in education, including reforms promoting accountability and reforms related to human resource management in education.

Dr. Hannaway previously served on the faculty of Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford Universities. She has authored or co-authored seven books and numerous papers in education and management journals. Her most recent book is Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today’s Schools co-edited with Andrew Rotherham, published by Harvard Education Press. She served twice as vice president of the American Educational Research Association and also served on the Executive Board. She was elected to the Council of the Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM) and is a member of the advisory committee to the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) for education studies. Hannaway serves on the editorial board of a number of journals and is past editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the main policy journal of the American Educational Research Association. She previously was on the Executive Board of the American Education Finance Association and has served on a number of panels and workshops for the National Research Council. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Janet Hansen

Committee for Economic Development

Janet Hansen is Vice President and Director of Education Studies for the Committee for Economic Development in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include K-12 school finance and K-12 school reform, as well as higher education access, affordability, and effectiveness. Dr. Hansen’s current work focuses on transforming American school finance into a performance-oriented system that supports and encourages the effective use of educational resources to improve student learning. Prior to rejoining CED in 2007 (where she also worked from 1999-2004) she conducted policy research at the RAND Corporation. There she served as RAND’s project director on a joint study of school finance reform sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Hansen received a Ph.D. in public and international affairs from Princeton University. She is currently as research affiliate at the National Center on Performance Incentives, an adjunct research staff member at RAND, and a senior adviser to the College Board’s “Thinking Student Aid” project. She has served as a distinguished Senior Fellow at the Education Commission of the States and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Education Finance Association. She has been a reviewer and technical panel member at the National Center for Education Statistics and a study committee member and subsequently a senior program officer at the National Research Council of the National Academies.

Eric Hanushek

Stanford University

Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is also chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. Professor Hanushek is an expert on educational policy, specializing in the economics and finance of schools. His ongoing research spans a number of the most important areas of education policy including the impacts of high-stakes accountability and of class size reduction and the importance of teacher quality. These analyses, combined with his work on efficiency and resource usage, related directly to current debates about school finance adequacy and equity, especially as they have been applied in litigation. Analyses of growth and the economic impact of school outcomes provide an economic rationale for improving school quality and for promoting more efficient use of school resources.

He previously held academic appointments at the University of Rochester, Yale University, and the U.S. Air Force Academy. Government service includes posts as the Deputy Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Senior Staff Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, and Senior Economist for the Cost of Living Council. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he earned his Bachelor of Science Degree. He completed his Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bryan Hassel

Public Impact

Bryan Hassel is Co-Director of Public Impact. He consults nationally with leading public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and foundations working for dramatic improvements in K-12 education. He is a recognized expert on charter schools, school turnarounds, education entrepreneurship and human capital in education. In addition to numerous articles, mongraphs, and how-to guides for practitioners, he co-authored the National Governors Association’s Improving Teaching through Pay for Contribution and authored the Brookings Press book The Charter School Challenge: Avoiding the Pitfalls, Fulfilling the Promise. Dr. Hassel received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard University and his masters in politics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he attended as a Morehead Scholar.

Frederick Hess

American Enterprise Institute

Frederick Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also executive editor of Education Next. He is best known for his work on a broad range of K-12 and higher education issues including accountability, charter schooling and school choice, urban reform, collective bargaining, the No Child Left Behind Act, teacher and administrator quality, governance, college affordability, philanthropy, and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Hess’s many books include When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008), Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Spinning Wheels (Brookings, 1998). His work has appeared in scholarly journals including Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Quarterly, the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, the Journal of Teacher Education, the American Journal of Education, Educational Policy, Education and Urban Society, and the Urban Affairs Review. He has also writeen for the general interest publications including National Review, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, adn the Boston Globe, as well as for general educational publications such as the American School Board Journal, Phi Delta Kappan, Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Educaiton, Educational Leadership, and School Administrator.

Dr. Hess is a faculty associate with the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance. He served on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education, the research advisory board for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the board of directors for Standards Work, and on the advisory board for the annual Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup survey of public opinion toward schooling. He serves as the editor for a book series with Harvard Education Press, Rowman & Littleman, and Palgrave Macmillan; as the lead faculty partner in designing the Rice University School of Businesses’s Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program; and as co-chair in the “Futures” project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

A former public high school social studies teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dr. Hess holds an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He has taught or is currently on faculty at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Harvard University, and Rice University.

Laurence Kotlikoff

Boston University

Laurence J. Kotlikoff is Professor of Economics at Boston University, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and President of Economics Security Planning, Inc., a company specializing in financial planning software. From 1977 through 1983 he served on the faculties of economics of the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University. In 1981-82 Professor Kotlikoff was a Senior Economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Kotlikoff has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the Government of Russia, the Government of Ukraine, the Government of Bolivia, the Government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, AON Corp., and other major U.S. corporations.

He has provided expert testimony on numerous occasions to committees of Congress including the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. Professor Kotlikoff is author or co-author of 13 books and hundreds of professional journal articles. His most recent book, co-authored with Scott Burns, is forthcoming with Simon&Schuster and is entitled Spend ‘Til the End. Professor Kotlikoff publishes extensively in newspapers and magazines on issues of deficits, generational accounting, the tax structure, social security, Medicare, health reform, pensions, saving, insurance, and personal finance. Professor Kotlikoff received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1977.

James Lamenzo

Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission

Mr. Lamenzo has been the Actuary for the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) since 1997. He is responsible for performing PERAC’s actuarial valuations, determining annual appropriation amounts, reviewing and approving funding schedules for each system, and analyzing cost and liabilities under proposed legislation. Prior to joining PERAC, Mr. Lamenzo worked for KPMG as a consulting actuary for both public and private sector pension plans. Mr. Lamenzo is an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries and an Enrolled Actuary. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, with a B.S. in Mathematics.

Josh McGee

University of Arkansas

Josh McGee is a staff member in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Josh is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. Josh has worked in many fields including stints as an engineering consultant and a charter school administrator. His current research interests include the economics of education, economic development, and labor economics.

Amy Monahan

University of Missouri-Columbia

Professor Monahan joined the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Law in 2004, after having taught at Notre Dame Law School and serving as a visiting scholar at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. She is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Prior to beginning her teaching career, Professor Monahan practiced law with Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago. While in law school, she was the Managing Editor of the Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law. Professor Monahan’s scholarly work has appeared in such journals as the Illinois Law Review, the Tulane Law Review, and the Virginia Tax Review. She currently serves as the Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Employee Benefits. She teaches Basic Federal Income Taxation, Employee Benefits Law, Partnership Taxation, and Taxation of Property Transactions.

Professor Monahan received her B.A. in 1996 from The Johns Hopkins University and her J.D. in 1999 from Duke University School of Law.

F. Howard Nelson

American Federation of Teachers

F. Howard Nelson is Lead Researcher for the American Federation of Teachers, Office of the President. His recent work has focused on various aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act, especially teacher mobility as it relates to the shortage of quality teachers in high-needs schools. One aspect of this work is the technical analysis of performance pay systems for teachers including value-added models. Another aspect of his current work is providing strategic research for the AFT’s effort to recruit veteran teachers for New Orleans. Nelson is an author of a controversial study released in 2004, Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Prior to these efforts, he directed the federally-funded National Charter School Finance Study. For more than a decade, Nelson prepared the annual 50-state teacher salary survey of the AFT. He also specializes in analyzing budgets, international education data, education vouchers, and analyzing private contracting in public schools. Prior to joining the AFT, Nelson taught school finance in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Shawn Ni

University of Missouri-Columbia

Shawn Ni is Middlebrush Professor of Economics and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at University of Missouri. His recent research concerns empirical analysis of disaggregated data, such as household consumption, evaluation of teachers and schools, and the effect of pensions on teachers’ retirement. Many of these problems involve analysis of dynamic panel data with limited numbers of observations on each unit and with observations subject to measurement errors. Professor Ni develops frequentist and Bayesian approaches to dynamic panel data models and dynamic discrete choice models for analysis of disaggregated data.

Michael Podgursky

University of Missouri-Columbia

Michael Podgursky is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he served as department chair from 1995-2005. He has written many articles and reports on teacher compensation and teacher labor markets. His research has been supported by federal and state agencies as well as several private foundations. He serves on the board of editors of Education Finance and Policy, Peabody Journal of Education, and advisory boards for various statistical agencies and research institutes. He is a co-investigator at the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the Urban Institute, two IES-funded national research centers.

Joseph Quinn

Boston College

Joseph Quinn is a Professor of Economics at Boston College and the former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He has done extensive research on aging issues. His work has covered the economics of aging with emphasis on the economic status of the elderly, Social Security reform, the determinants of the individual retirement decision, and trends and patterns of labor force withdrawal among older Americans. Professor Quinn’s early work using the Retirement History Survey from the 1970s was summarized in Passing the Torch: The Influence of Economic Incentives on Work and Retirement (1990) co-authored by Richard Burkhauser and Daniel Myers. He is now working with the Health and Retirement Survey, analyzing the nature and timing of retirement during the 1990s. Professor Quinn has served on numerous boards and was co-chair of the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement Savings for President Clinton’s 1994-95 Advisory Council on Social Security.

Dr. Quinn received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

David P. Richardson

TIAA-CREF Institute

David P. Richardson is a Principal Research Fellow at the TIAA-CREF Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, he served as Senior Economist for Public Finance at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and held the New York Life Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University. Previously, Dr. Richardson worked as a Financial Economist in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Treasurey, and was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Davidson College.

Dr. Richardson’s research interests focus on public pensions, employer plans, and household financial security, including retirement preparedness, retiree health care, and the allocation of retiree risk burdens. He is a research fellow for the China Center for Insurance and Social Security Research at Peking University and served as a research fellow for the Center for Risk Management Research and as a research associate at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Richardson is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Risk and Insurance Association, and the National Tax Association. He earned a M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Boston College, and a B.A. from the University of Georgia.

Andrew J. Rotherham

Education Sector

Andrew J. Rotherham is co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank. He also writes the blog Eduwonk.com, which is in Education Week and cited as among the most influential information sources in education today, as well as regular columnfor U.S. News & 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 co-editor of four influential books on educational policy. Rotherham serves on advisory boards and committees for a variety of organizations including The Broad Foundation, Harvard University, and the National Governors Association. Rotherham is also a trustee of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy and a member of the board of directors for the Indianapolis Mind Trust and Democrats for Education Reform.

Mark Schneider

American Institutes for Research

Mark Schneider joined the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in 2008 as a vice president for new initiatives in the Education, Human Development, and the Workforce Division. Schneider has served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, from 2005 through 2008, after serving as deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Research beginning in August 2004. Schneider is also distinguished professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on urban politics, public policy and a broad range of education issues, including charter schools, consumer choice, and the relationship between school facilities and academic outcomes. His 1989 book The Competitive City won special recognition by the American Political Science Association’s Urban Politics Section for its theoretical contribution to the study of urban politics. His book, Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools (Princeton U. Press, 2000 with Paul Teske and Melissa Marshall) won the Aaron Wildavsky best book prize from the Policy Studies Organization. His most recent book Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? (with Jack Buckley) was published by Princeton University Press in 2007.

Schneider has been active in his professional organizations, having served as the Vice President of the American Political Science Association 2000-01; President of the American Politcal Science Association Public Policy Section, 2000-01; Program Chair of the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meetings, 2001; and on the executive council of the Midwest Political Science Association, the APSA Urban Section, and the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1974 and he held a Fullbright-Hays Senior Fellowship from 1980-81 at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.

Elizabeth Smith

Vanderbilt University

Elizabeth Ettema Smith is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Her research interests include teacher training, assessments of teacher quality and effectiveness, and teacher retirement systems in the United States and abroad. She currently serves as a research assistant for Professor James Guthrie. She taught elementary school in Atlanta and Nashville for six years before returning to Vanderbilt to pursue her Ph.D. She received a B.S. in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University and M.Ed. in Elementary Education from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

Matthew G. Springer

Vanderbilt University

Matthew G. Springer is a research assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and director of the federally-funded National Center on Performance Incentives. Professor Springer’s research interests involve education policy issues, with a particular focus on the impact of policy on resource allocation decisions and student outcomes. His current research includes studies of the impact of pay for performance on student achievement and teacher turnover, mobility, and quality; the strategic resoruce allocation decision-making of schools in response to No Child Left Behind; the impact of school finance litigation on resource distribution; and the role of school choice in contemporary education policy. Professor Springer’s research is currently funded by the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, New York City’s Fund for Public Schools, Smith Richardson Foundation, Texas Education Agency, and United States Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. He has also served on several advisory committees charged with designing pay for performance compensation systems for teachers and/or principals at the state and district level, and conducted analyses of school finance systems in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, and South Carolina.

Professor Springer’s work has appeared in academic outlets such as Economics of Education Review, Education Economics, Education Next, Journal of Education Finance, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He is co-author of the textbook Education Finance and Policy (with J.W. Guthrie, R.A. Rolle,a nd E.A. Houck) and editor of Charter School Outcomes (with M. Berends and H.J. Walberg), Handbook of Research on School Choice (with M. Berends, D. Ballou, and H.J. Walberg), and Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education. Professor Springer received a B.A. from Denison University and his Ph.D. in education finance and policy from Vanderbilt University.

Robert P. Strauss

Carnegie-Mellon University

Robert P. Strauss has been Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University since 1979. He began his academic career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the department of economics in 1969. In 1992-94 he was a Visiting Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Rochester. He received his undergraduate training in economics at the Honors College of the University of Michigan and earned his B.A. in 1966, and received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 with specializations in public finance and human resources.

He has been involved in two periods of federal service which resulted int he receipt of presidential pens. While at the U.S. Treasury, initially as a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow and then assistant to the Deputy Secretary, he received a presidential pen from President Richard Nixon in 1972, and while an Economist on the Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, U.S. Congress, he received a presidential pen from President Gerald Ford in 1976.

Since joining Carnegie Mellon in 1979, he has been involved in a number of significant state level tax policy projects for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Washington State, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. He has also been involved in state education policy projects in Pennsylvania and New York dealing with school finance and teacher preparation and selection.

He has served on various federal advisory committees, including the U.S. Treasury Study of the Federal System, the Statistics of Income Division of the Internal Revenue Service, Governments Division of the U.S. Census, and the Revenue Estimating Advisory Board of the Joint Committee on Taxation. Most recently he was a member of the National Academies panel on state and local government statistics whose report was published in October 2007. Throughout his career he has been invited to testify before the tax committees of Congress, and numerous committees of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, Illinois, Arkansas, and other states.

At Carnegie Mellon, he has served as Associate Dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs, elected Secretary of the University Faculty, Vice Chair of the Faculty Committee on the University Budget, a member of the Faculty Review Committee, a member of the University Committee on Tenure, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on University Computing.

Click here for more information about Professor Strauss, including online papers. Click herefor a list of online papers on education policy.

Lori Taylor

Texas A&M University

Lori Taylor is an assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a Program Area Leader for School Finance, Facilities and Organizations in the State of Texas Education Research Center at Texas A&M. She has written extensively on variations in the cost of education and recently developed a Comparable Wage Index for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Dr. Taylor’s current projects explore differences in teacher quality between charter and traditional public schools, the impact of facilities on teacher turnover and school productivity, adn the effects of performance pay in education. Her work on school finance issues has been publishe in The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Urban Economics, Economic Inquiry, Education Finance and Policy, The Journal of Education Finance, and the AEFA Yearbook. She is a member of the American Education Finance Association’s Board of Directors, and a Research Affiliate of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University. Professor Taylor holds a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Kansas, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester.

Doannie Tran

Teach Plus Policy Fellow

Doannie Tran began teaching as a Teach for America corps member in Oakland, California after graduating with a degree in chemistry from the University of Georgia. He has taught at the middle and high school level and currently teaches chemistry and anatomy and physiology at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury, Massachusetts. As a teacher, he has focused on finding creative, relevant and interesting intersections between art, social justice and science. His studnets have created stop motion animations of chemistry concepts, tested candy and water for lead content, and put on symposiums on stem cell research. Outside of the classroom, Mr. Tran has supported other teachers as Learning Team Leader for Teach for America and as Technology Support Teacher for the O’Bryant School. In addition to teaching, hs is currently a Teach Plus Policy Fellow.

Sarah E. Turner

University of Virginia

Sarah Turner is University Professor of Economics and Education at the University of Virginia and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Turner’s research focuses on both the supply and demand sides of the education market and the link with the labor market, with particular attention to how public policies affect outcomes. Recent research prjoects include the “Aid and Application Awareness” survey of how high school seniors and their parents perceive the costs of different collegiate options, expectations about the likelihood of admission, general knowledge of financial aid, and sources of guidance and informatio in the college application process. Turner’s research also examines scientific labor markets and the internationalization of doctorate education with a focus on understanding the distribution of students by country of origin and program quality at U.S. institutions, the domestic and home-country factors affecting the persistence of foreign-boarn Ph.D.’s in the U.S. labor market, and how the influx of foreign Ph.D.’s affects wages and future decisions to enter science and engineering fields. Turner received her B.A. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Jacob Vigdor

Duke University

Jacob Vigdor is Associate Professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics at Duke University, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interersts are in the broad areas of education policy, housing policy, and political economy. Within those areas, he has published numerous scholarly articles on the topics of residential segregation, immigration, housing affordability, the consequences of gentrification, the determinants of student achievement in elementary school, the causes and consequences of delinquent behavior among adolescents, teacher turnover, civic participation and voting patterns, adn racial inequality in the labor market. These articles have been published in outlets such as The Journal of Political Economy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Public Economics, The Journal of Human Resources, and The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Professor Vigdor’s scholarly activities have been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Spencer Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received a B.S. in Policy Analysis from Cornell University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1999. Vigdor has taught at Duke since 1999.