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Dr. Matthew Ladner is the Senior Advisor of Policy and Research for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. He previously served as Vice President of Research and Goldwater Institute. Prior to joining Goldwater, Ladner was director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice.

Ladner has written numerous studies on school choice, charter schools and special education reform and coauthored Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform for the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ladner has testified before Congress, the United States Commission of Civil Rights and numerous state legislative committees. Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received both a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Houston. Ladner is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Educational Choice and the Goldwater Institute. Dr. Ladner lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife Anne and children Benjamin, Jacob and Abigail.

Mary L. Landrieu has been fighting and winning for Louisiana since she was first elected to the Louisiana state legislature at the age of 23. After serving eight years as a state representative and two terms as State Treasurer, in 1996 she became the first woman from Louisiana elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate. Senator Landrieu is currently the Chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security and a member of the Energy and Natural Resources, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees. The nonpartisan Congress.org has ranked Senator Landrieu as the tenth most effective legislator in the Senate.

Senator Landrieu has been the leading voice in Washington for the Gulf Coast recovery effort. In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the failures of the federal levee system, she secured billions in recovery dollars and has worked extensively to jumpstart recovery projects. She is committed to reforming the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure the nation’s disaster response arm is speedy and effective the next time a disaster strikes the United States, be it natural or manmade.

John Legend, is an American singer-songwriter and actor. He has won nine Grammy Awards, and in 2007, he received the special Starlight Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

On September 8, 2010, John Legend joined the national board of Teach For America. Legend also sits on the boards of The Education Equality Project, the Harlem Village Academies, and Stand for Children. He serves on the Harlem Village Academies’ National Leadership Board.

Albert Lord served as the Chief Executive Officer of SLM Corporation (also known as Sallie Mae) since December 14, 2007. Mr. Lord served as the Chief Executive Officer of SLM Corp. from 1997 to May 2005. He began his career with SLM Corporation in 1981 as its Controller. He served as Chief Executive Officer of LCL Ltd. from December 1993 to August 1997 and also served as its President from 1994 to 1997. He began his career with Peat, Marwick, Mitchell in 1967. He joined First Pennsylvania Corp. as Treasurer in 1973.

He served as an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Student Loan Marketing Association from 1990 to 1994 and various officer positions from 1981 to 1990. From 1991 to 1994, Mr. Lord served several executive positions at Sallie Mae Inc., including Controller and Chief Operating Officer. He served as Chief Executive Officer of Sallie Mae, Inc. He serves as the Chairman of Cesar Chavez Charter Schools. He served as the Chairman of School Night for three years. He served as Executive Chairman of SLM Corporation from November 2007 to January 2008 and also previously served as its Chairman from March 2005 to November 2007. He served as Vice Chairman of SLM Corporation from January 2008 to May 2013 and previously served as its Vice Chairman from July 1997 to May 2005. He served as a Director of SLM Corporation from July 5, 1995 to May 29, 2013. Mr. Lord has been a Member of Seneca Ridge Management, LLC since 2005. Mr. Lord serves as an Advisory Board Member of the Washington Redskins Leadership Council. He served as a Director of SLM Holding Corp. until December 31, 2012. He served as a Director of BearingPoint Inc. (formerly, KPMG Consulting Inc.) from February 6, 2003 to June 1, 2009. He serves as a Director of National Academy Foundation and Children’s Choice Learning Centers, Inc. He served as an Independent Director of SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. since July 2001. He served as a Director of Student Loan Marketing Association from 1990 to 1994. Mr. Lord holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Business from Pennsylvania State University.

Roger Lowenstein, a former criminal defense attorney, founded The Los Angeles Leadership Academy. The school was founded to academically prepare students and to orient them as community activists and reflects Lowenstein’s liberal views.

Teresa S. Lubbers is the current Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education. She served from 1992 to 2009 as a Republican member of the Indiana Senate, representing the 30th District.

Lubbers was elected to represent the 30th District in the Indiana Senate in November 1992. Lubbers was re-elected in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. She represents parts of Marion and Hamilton Counties. During her time in the Indiana Senate, she served on a number of committees, including Education, Judiciary (Courts and Juvenile Justice Subcommittee), Pensions & Labor, and Planning & Economic Development Committee.

Bobbi Macdonald is the founder of The City Neighbors Foundation, Inc. and serves as its Executive Director. Mrs. Macdonald has been a Director of Hamilton BanCorp. Inc., since 2008. Mrs. Macdonald is a dynamic leader in the movement for transforming public education in Baltimore.

Recently, Mrs. Macdonald helped to facilitate a partnership with three schools of Northeast Baltimore and the Mainstreets Program and received community grants to build the Northeast Schools Alliance.

She is an advocate for grassroots organizing for building strong communities. Mrs. Macdonald is a board member of the Maryland Charter School Network, and founding member and past Chair of the Coalition for Baltimore Charter Schools. She is also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Illinois in Human Development and Family Ecology, and holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in Curriculum and Instruction.

Jack McCarthy is President and CEO of AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation and AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School. Through Jack’s leadership, AppleTree’s impact on policy and practice has increased each year. Jack has influenced education innovation through social entrepreneurship since 1993, combining his experience and interest in business and politics with a citizen’s sense of urgency about the degree to which public schools fail to educate our most vulnerable children.

After working in government and politics early in his career, Jack worked at Boston Bay Capital, Inc. a provider of equity for historic properties. This experience led him to the education reform field as a co-founder of Boston Renaissance Charter School, where he led the innovative $14 million financing and renovation of the school’s urban facility. As he witnessed the reaction of the 1,000 parents whose children did not win the charter school’s initial lottery, Jack was deeply moved to find ways of increasing the number of effective schools for traditionally underserved children.

With Alexis C. “Lex” Towle, an entrepreneurial colleague from that first venture, Jack co-founded AppleTree Institute in 1996, created a charter school incubator, and supported the creation of Washington Mathematics Science Technology PCS, Cesar Chavez Public Policy PCS, and Paul PCS. Jack saw the number of children entering high school reading at a 5th grade level and concluded that the place where he could make the greatest impact was in creating preschools that could erase the achievement gap before children even entered kindergarten.
In 2001, they created a tuition-free, privately funded laboratory preschool in Southwest DC. Working with leading researchers, Jack implemented a scientifically based reading research program with encouraging results. In 2005, with the involvement of another social entrepreneur Russ Williams, Jack wrote a successful charter application and AppleTree Early Learning PCS was born. Later that year, Jack recruited Mary Anne Lesiak to join AppleTree, which led to a series of Early Reading First grants from the US Department of Education that fueled the acceleration of research, development, implementation and continuous improvement of AppleTree’s evidence-based instructional program.
Under Jack’s leadership, AppleTree has grown to a $14 million enterprise with 175 staff and a growing impact on policy and practice. AppleTree Institute won a $5 million US Department of Education Investing in Innovation (‘i3”) development grant for Every Child Ready in 2010. Today, AppleTree Early Learning educates 640 children at seven sites throughout Washington, DC.

Jack is a graduate of The American University in Washington, DC and has a certificate in strategic management and governance of charter schools from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is married to Elaine McCarthy and has two sons, Liam and Christian.

Lowell Milken’s reputation as a visionary leader of education reform has been honed by more than three decades of education research, policy and practices — as well as firsthand visits to thousands of classrooms and the creation of major national initiatives.

Under Lowell Milken’s guidance since its establishment in 1982, the Milken Family Foundation has become one of the nation’s most innovative private foundations, developing groundbreaking programs in K-12 education as well as medical research, as well as helping to fund more than 1,000 organizations worldwide with compatible missions.

Among his contributions to strengthening K-12 education, Lowell Milken conceived the Milken Educator Awards, first presented in 1987, to recognize the importance of outstanding educators and to encourage talented young people to choose teaching as a career. With a network of 2,500 recipients, the Milken Educator Awards is the nation’s preeminent teacher recognition program, coined “the Oscars of teaching” by Teacher Magazine.

Lowell’s lifelong commitment to education reform has led to some of the country’s most innovative means to dramatically improve teacher effectiveness, includingTAP™: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement. Founded in 1999, TAP was conceived by Lowell Milken to significantly improve teacher recruitment, retention, practices, motivation and performance. A comprehensive school reform system, TAP provides powerful opportunities to teachers and administrators to pursue multiple career paths, receive ongoing daily-applied professional growth, participate in instructionally focused accountability and earn additional compensation and bonuses based on multiple measures of performance. TAP’s multi-tiered formula has resulted in higher levels of achievement with students and schools where TAP is implemented in comparison to respective non-TAP counterparts.

Based on the rapid growth, strong results and high demand of the TAP system,Lowell created the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) in 2005 as an independent public charity to support and manage TAP nationally and to foster powerful teacher quality initiatives through the NIET Best Practices Center. Equipped with a staff drawn from the education and business communities, NIET forges partnerships with states, districts, schools, and non-profit organizations to ensure TAP’s effectiveness and sustainability in a diverse set of urban, rural and suburban schools across America. The NIET Best Practices Center provides innovative services, support and solutions to schools, districts and states to improve educator effectiveness. Based on over ten years of experience in teacher quality initiatives, the Best Practices Center works with states, districts and schools to design powerful systems for teacher evaluation, job-embedded professional development, performance-based compensation based on multiple measures, and teacher leadership in schools. Together, the Best Practices Center and TAP are improving the educational experience for more than 100,000 teachers and one million students.

The Lowell Milken Center discovers, develops and communicates the stories of unsung heroes who have made a profound and positive difference on the course of history. Through student-driven project-based learning, people throughout America and the world learn that each of us has the responsibility and the power to take actions that “repair the world” by improving the lives of others. Founded in 2007 in partnership with Milken Educator Norman Conard (KS ’92), the Lowell Milken Center has engaged more than 600,000 students in 5,250 schools in 26 countries.

In 1990, Lowell created the Lowell Milken Archive of Jewish Music to explore the vast panorama of sacred and secular works reflecting 350 years of Jewish life in America. This historic recording project has grown to encompass 700 newly recorded works—500 of them world-premiere recordings—and more than 800 hours of oral history videos. The Milken Archive recently launched a new “virtual museum” website to make this content accessible to people of all faiths and cultures.

Further education efforts championed by Lowell include High Tech Los Angeles, a public charter school that engages students with a rigorous curriculum rich in technology and complemented by real-world internships. Officially dedicated in 2004, HTLA achieved California Distinguished School status in record time.
With the recent establishment of the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, Lowell’s work in education extends greater opportunities to UCLA law students, faculty, young law practitioners and alumni. Building on UCLA School of Law’s already outstanding programs, the Lowell Milken Institute provides expanded studies on business law and policy, clinical experience, additional research opportunities for faculty, along with faculty fellowships, student scholarships and awards. The knowledge, skills and experience available through theLowell Milken Institute will help ensure that students are prepared to not only assume leadership roles in the practice of law, but also in the areas of business, government, and philanthropy.

Recognition for Lowell’s achievements in education has included awards from organizations such as the National Association of State Boards of Education, the Horace Mann League, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Jewish Theological Seminary, Kappa Delta Pi international honor society in the field of education and UCLA School of Law. Hebrew Union College presented him with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

Named by Worth magazine as one of America’s most generous philanthropists, Lowell is also an involved businessman who chairs London-based Heron International, a worldwide leader in property development, and Knowledge Universe, Inc., a leading company in early childhood education and educational programs and services—with over 38,000 employees worldwide.

Lowell is a product of California’s public school system, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the School of Business Administration’s Most Outstanding Student Award. He earned his law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, with the distinctions of Order of the Coif and UCLA Law Review. His four sons inspire and deepen his commitment to quality educational opportunities for all young people.