Stacey Childress
Harvard Business School
Secretary, EEP Board
Stacey Childress is a Lecturer in the General Management unit at Harvard Business School, and a co-founder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. Stacey studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. This includes the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit and for-profit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. She is also interested more generally in a range of social enterprise topics, including international social entrepreneurship.
Howard Fuller
Marquette Institute
Director, EEP Board
Howard Fuller’s career includes many years in both public service positions and the field of education. Dr. Fuller is a Distinguished Professor of Education, and Founder/Director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The mission of the Institute is to support exemplary education options that transform learning for children, while empowering families, particularly low-income families, to choose the best options for their children. Immediately before his appointment at Marquette University, Dr. Fuller served as the Superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools June 1991 - June 1995. Dr. Fuller became nationally known for his unending support for fundamental educational reform.
Dr. Fuller is also the Chair of the Board of the Black Alliance for Educational Options; the Chair of the Board of the Wisconsin Municipalities Private School Finance Commission; the Chair of the Board of the Alliance for Choices in Education in Milwaukee; and the Chair of the Board of CEO Leadership Academy. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Transcenter for Youth; the Johnson Foundation; the Big Picture Company; the Joyce Foundation; School Choice Wisconsin; Advocates for School Choice; The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; The Charter School Review Committee for the City of Milwaukee; the Wisconsin United for Health Foundation, Inc.
Dr. Fuller received his B.S. degree in Sociology from Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 1962; M.S.A. degree in Social Administration from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964, and his Ph.D. in Sociological Foundations of Education from Marquette University.
Roy Romer
College Board
Director, EEP Board
Former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer recently assumed the role of senior advisor to the president of the College Board. In this role, Romer will work closely with the U.S. Department of Education, the nation’s governors, chief state school officers and district superintendents to promote world-class standards in all schools. He will advocate on behalf of policies and programs that will create new standards, curricula, assessments and teacher professional development programs that are anchored in rigorous academic content that prepare all students for success in college and the 21st-century workforce.
Immediately prior to joining College Board, Governor Romer was Chairman of Strong American Schools, a nonprofit entity based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for higher academic standards, performance pay for teachers, and extended learning time. He was formerly Superintendent of Schools for the Los Angeles Unified School District. As Superintendent, he focused resources and attention on instruction and construction of schools. He advocated ambitious literacy and math plans that included computer-based learning programs and teacher training. As a result, scores in elementary school reading and math were above the national levels for the first time in decades.
Romer was Governor of Colorado for three terms, from 1986 to 1998, becoming the nation’s senior Democratic governor, and was the general chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2000. He was vice chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, an information-age think tank that examines national political and policy issues, where he studied effective educational strategies and school reform initiatives.
He served as chair of the Educational Commission of the States and the National Education Goals Panel. Romer was a legal officer in the U.S. Air Force and practiced law in Colorado. Romer earned his law degree at the University of Colorado.
Amy Wilkins
The Education Trust
Director, EEP Board
Amy Wilkins is an experienced political and community organizer with a special skill in media communications. At the Education Trust, Amy serves as the Vice President for Government Affairs and Communications. In this capacity, Amy oversees the Trust’s media, data, and government affairs and coalition work. She has sharpened her skills in advocacy over years of successful work for the Children’s Defense Fund, the Democratic National Committee, the Peace Corps, and the White House Office of Media Affairs, among others.
Joe Williams
Democrats for Education Reform
President and Treasurer, EEP Board
After more than a decade of frontline newspaper reporting on education reform, Joe Williams has established a nationally-recognized reputation as a writer, contributor and speaker on cutting-edge education reform issues at the federal, state, and local levels. His most celebrated work was as author of the controversial book Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
In June of 2007, Joe decided to make it his full-time job to implement the social change for which his investigative journalism had repeatedly called, and he was named Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Williams identified with DFER’s focus on building a powerful national coalition in support of meaningful education reform.
Joe knew from his research and writing that a political problem demanded a political solution—a solution that draws on all communities and community leaders who are committed to putting America’s children first.
Joe previously worked as an award-winning education journalist for the New York Daily News. He also served as an education reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he won numerous local, state, and national awards for his coverage of the Milwaukee Public Schools and that city’s groundbreaking school choice programs.
In addition to studying reform efforts in Milwaukee, Joe has completed exhaustive research on the challenges of individual school districts in cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He has developed expertise on national education policy such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, and on state issues such as the growing Charter School movement.
Joe has written in-depth pieces for the Hechinger Institute, the Thomas Fordham Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as a non-resident Senior Fellow at Education Sector, a non-partisan, Washington DC-based think tank.
Joe has contributed book chapters, articles and policy reports on numerous education-reform related topics, and for a variety of respected publications including: Education Next, Education Sector, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Press.
Raul Yzaguirre
Arizona State University - Center for Community Development and Civil Rights
Director, EEP Board
As the national civil rights movement burgeoned, Raul Yzaguirre emerged as a leading thinker in the Hispanic community. A funding proposal he helped craft for NOMAS led to the first comprehensive studies of the Mexican American community and their unique social, economic, and cultural issues. That same proposal served as the conceptual framework for what would become the National Council of La Raza. NCLR began as a regional support organization to help strengthen local Mexican American worker and welfare organizations, fight for fair employment laws and access to housing and health care, and promote voter registration.
