Outside Experts

Jeffrey R. Henig
Jeffrey R. Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, and professor of political science at Columbia University. Among his books on education policy and politics are 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); Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (Kansas, 2001), and Mayors in the Middle: Politics, Race, and Mayoral Control of Urban Schools (Princeton University Press 2004). His latest book, Spin Cycle: How research Gets Used in Policy debates, The Case of Charter Schools will be published in early 2008.
Read "Mayoral Control of Schools: Concepts, Tradeoffs, and Outcomes" >

Michael Kirst
Mike Kirst is Emeritus Professor of Education and Business Administration, by courtesy, at Stanford University. As a policy generalist, Kirst has published articles on school fi nance politics, curriculum politics, intergovernmental relations, and education reform policies. He is the author of 10 books, including From High School to College (2004), and The Political Dynamics of American Education (2005). Kirst was a member of the California State Board of Education from 1975 to 1982 and its president from 1977 to 1981. He was cofounder of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) in 1983, and is a member of the management and research staff of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Kirst held several positions with the federal government, including staff director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Manpower and Poverty.
Read "Mayoral Control: What We Can and Cannot Learn From Other Cities" >

John Portz and Robert Schwartz

John Portz is a Professor in Political Science at Northeastern University and currently serves as the chair of the Political Science Department.  He teaches and conducts research in the general areas of state and local politics, public administration, and public education.  His research interests include school politics and governance as well as leadership.  Publications include a co-authored book, City Schools and City Politics:  Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston and St. Louis, by University Press of Kansas (1999).  In his home community of Watertown, he served as an elected member of the Town Council for eight years and was elected in 2005 to serve on the Watertown School Committee. 

Robert Schwartz currently serves as Academic Dean and Bloomberg Professor of Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Education.  He joined the HGSE faculty in 1996 as a Lecturer, and from 1997-2002 also served as the first  President of Achieve, Inc, a national non-profit organization founded by a bipartisan group of governors and corporate leaders to help state leaders improve their schools.  From 1990-1996 Schwartz directed the education grantmaking program of The Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the nation’s largest private philanthropies.  Earlier in his career Schwartz held a wide variety of positions in education and government: high school English teacher and principal; education policy advisor to the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts; assistant director of the National Institute of Education; special assistant to the President of the University of Massachusetts; and executive director of The Boston Compact, a public-private partnership to improve access to higher education and employment for urban high school graduates.  Schwartz has written and spoken widely on standards-based reform, public-private partnerships, high school reform, and the transition from school to college and career.  He has degrees from Harvard College and Brandeis University.
Read "Governance and the Boston Public Schools: Lessons in ‘Mayoral Control’ of Urban Schools" >

Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 1996-2005, she held the Brown Chair in Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and edited Brookings Papers on Education Policy.

Ravitch is a member of the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, the Albert Shanker Institute of the American Federation of Teachers, Common Good, the James B. Hunt Leadership Institute, and the Core Knowledge Foundation. From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to which she was appointed by Secretary of Education Richard Riley.

From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education responsible for the Offi ce of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and she was counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander. Before entering government service, she was Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Her most recent book is Edspeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon (2007). In 2006, she and her son Michael Ravitch published The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know, an anthology of classic English literature. In 2003, she published The Language Police (2003). She has written seven other books, including Left Back (2000); The Troubled Crusade (1983); and The Great School Wars (1974) and edited fi fteen books. In addition, she has written nearly 500 articles and reviews for scholarly and popular publications.

In 2005, she received the John Dewey award from the United Federation of Teachers in New York City and the Uncommon Book Award from the Hoover Institution.

She was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education, the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and PEN International.

She has received honorary degrees from Williams College; Reed College; Amherst College; the State University of New York; Ramapo College; St. Joseph's College of New York; Middlebury College Language Schools; and Union College.

A native of Houston, she is a graduate of the Houston public schools. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1975.
Read "A History of Public School Governance in New York City" >

Wilbur C. Rich
Wilbur C. Rich received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Illinois.  He is the William J. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He has taught at several universities and is the author of Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary and Newark (1996). He also co-edited a volume entitled Mayors in Middle: Politics, Race, and Mayor Control of Urban Schools (2004). His latest book is David Dinkins and New York City Politics: Race, Images, and the Media (2007) One of the chapters in this latest book reviewed the former mayor’s relationship with New York City School Board.

Read "Who's Afraid of a Mayoral Takeover of Detroit Public Schools?">

Clara Hemphill

Clara Hemphill is an acclaimed author, editor and social entrepreneur. The New York Times called her three books “the most definitive guides” to New York City public schools. New York magazine named her one of the 200 most influential New Yorkers for her work “empowering parents” as founding editor of the Insideschools.org website. As a reporter and editorial writer for New York Newsday, she shared the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. New York magazine called her writing on the homeless “worthy of Dickens.” A foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and a producer for CBS News based in Rome in the 1980s, she covered the war in Lebanon, the attempted assassination of the pope and numerous Mafia murders. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Robert Snyder, and two children, who attend public school.

Read "Parental Power and Mayoral Control: Avenues for Parent and Community Involvement in New York City Schools">

Dorothy Shipps

Dorothy Shipps is Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Education at the School of Public Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY. She teaches courses in educational policy analysis, school-community relationships, accountability, and leadership. Prior to becoming a professor, she was a co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, consultant to policy makers and civic leaders on school reform. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she directed education extension for several universities in California.

Shipps is the author of a recent book on Chicago’s schools School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880-2000 (2006), and is co-editor with Larry Cuban of Reconstructing the Common Good in Education (2000). In addition, she has published numerous chapters and articles on school reform, mayoral control in Chicago, and the civic capacity needed to institutionalize reform.

She has been honored as a Carnegie Scholar (2000-01), and a Warren Weaver Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation (1994-5). Her Ph.D. is from Stanford University and her M.A in Asian Studies is from the University of California at Berkeley.

Read "Updating Tradition: Governing the Schools from Chicago's City Hall">

Kenneth Wong

Kenneth Wong is the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy at Brown. He has conducted extensive research in the politics of education, federalism, policy innovation, outcome-based accountability, and governance redesign (including city and state takeover, management reform, and Title I school-wide reform). His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the US 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, governor and mayoral offices, and the leadership in several large urban school systems on how to redesign the accountability framework.

Read "Does Mayoral Control Improve Performance in Urban Districts?" >