Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a national nonprofit organization working to support educational innovation and improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Rotherham leads Bellwether’s thought leadership and policy analysis work. He is also the executive editor of the forthcoming Real Clear Education, part of the Real Clear Politics family of news and analysis websites, writes the blog Eduwonk.com, and is the co-publisher of “Education Insider” a federal policy analysis tool produced by Whiteboard Advisors. 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. Rotherham is the author or co-author of more than 250 published articles, book chapters, papers, and op-eds about education policy and politics and is the author or editor of four books on educational policy.

Marguerite Roza is the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Dr. Roza’s research traces the effects of fiscal policies at the federal, state and district levels for their implications on resources at school and classroom levels. Her calculations of dollar implications and cost equivalent trade-offs have prompted changes in education finance policy at all levels in the education system. She has led projects including the Finance and Productivity Initiative at CRPE and the Schools in Crisis Rapid Response Paper Series. More recently she served as senior economic advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Her work has been published by Education Sector, the Brookings Institution, Public Budgeting and Finance, Education Next and the Peabody Journal of Education. Dr. Roza is author of the highly regarded education finance book, Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? (Urban Institute Press, 2010).

Terry Ryan recently left his position as vice president for Ohio Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to become the president of the Idaho Charter School Network. Mr. Ryan began his career in education as a teacher in Poland and worked with the Polish Ministry of Education and the Foundation for Education for Democracy in the mid-1990s. He was awarded the Paterson International Fellowship from the University of Denver in 1994 and was a research director for the UK-based 21st Century Learning Initiative. Ryan was a 2008 New Schools Venture Fund/Aspen Institute Fellow and is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Eastern Illinois University and a master’s degree in political economy from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies.

Kai Schafft is associate professor of Educational Leadership in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He directs the Center on Rural Education and Communities and serves as editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Trained as a rural sociologist with strong interests in the relationship between social and spatial inequalities, his work broadly looks at the multiple associations between the well-being of rural schools and rural communities. He is the co-author, with David Brown, of Rural People and Communities in the Twenty-first Century: Resilience and Transformation (Polity, 2011) and co-editor, with Alicia Jackson, of Rural Education for the Twenty-first Century: Identity, Place and Community in a Globalizing World (Penn State Press, 2010).