NEPC Topic Experts on Early Childhood Education

William Ayers is a retired Distinguished Professor of Education, and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the importance of creating progressive educational opportunities in urban public schools. One of his books, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (Teachers College Press, 1993), was named Book of the Year in 1993 by Kappa Delta Pi and won the Witten Award for Distinguished Work in Biography and Autobiography in 1995. He is a graduate of the Bank Street College of Education and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Email William Ayers at: billayers123@gmail.com                  

William Ayers' blog

W. Steven Barnett is a Board of Governors Professor and Senior Co-Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. His research includes studies of the economics of early care and education including costs and benefits, the long-term effects of preschool programs on children’s learning and development, and the distribution of educational opportunities.

Email W. Steven Barnett at: sbarnett@nieer.org

Website: www.nieer.org

Clive Belfield is a Professor of Economics at Queens College, City University of New York, and the Principal Economist at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. His research interests include education privatization, labor economics, the economics of education, and benefit-cost analysis. Professor Belfield has published widely in the economics of education both in the U.S. and in the U.K. His most recent book is "Economic Evaluation in Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit-Cost Analysis" (co-edited with Levin, McEwan, Bowden and Shand, 2017).

Email Clive Belfield at: clive.belfield@gmail.com

Gregory Camilli is a professor at Rutgers University. His research interests include the effects of educational programs including Head Start and psychometric issues in educational policy, meta-analysis, and differential item functioning.

Email Gregory Camilli at: camilli@rutgers.edu

E-mail Antonia Darder at antonia.darder@lmu.edu

Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy, University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on early learning in diverse families and how institutions struggle to serve pluralistic communities. His forthcoming book is After the State and Market, a study of successful, decentralizing organizations (University of Chicago Press). Fuller is author of Standardized Childhood and Government Confronts Culture. A former research sociologist at the World Bank, he taught at Harvard University before returning to California.

Email Bruce Fuller at: b_fuller@uclink4.berkeley.edu

Dr. Mileidis Gort is Associate Dean of Students and Professor of Bilingual Education and Biliteracy at CU Boulder. She brings an interdisciplinary orientation to her research and teaching. Her primary research efforts focus on emergent bilingualism and biliteracy in early childhood, and to bring that knowledge to pre K-12 teacher education and practice in order to create culturally- and linguistically-responsive learning contexts for emergent bilingual learners. Her scholarship converges at two interrelated lines of research: (a) the language and literacy processes of young, Spanish-English emergent bilingual children, and (b) instructional practices and educational policies that support the dual language, biliteracy, and academic development of emergent bilingual children.

Email Mileidis Gort at: mileidis.gort@colorado.edu

Jaekyung Lee, PhD, is a professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A fellow of the prestigious American Educational Research Association (AERA), Lee is an internationally recognized leader in educational policy, accountability and equity, and international and comparative education. He has a PhD in education from the University of Chicago. Lee is currently a Richard P. Nathan Fellow of the Rockefeller Institute of Government. He was also a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a fellow of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the recipient of 2007 AERA Raymond B. Cattell Early Career Award and 2015 Western New York Educational Service Council Robert W. Heller Award. Lee is the author of "The Anatomy of Achievement Gaps: Why and How American Education is Losing (But Can Still Win) the War on Underachievement" (Oxford University Press).

Email Jaekyung Lee at: jl224@buffalo.edu

Susan Ohanian, a long-time public school teacher, is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Atlantic, Parents, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Phi Delta Kappan, Education Week, Language Arts, and American School Board Journal. In 2003, Ohanian received The National Council of Teachers of English's "NCTE Orwell Award" for her outstanding contribution, via her now-defunct website, to the critical analysis of public discourse.

Email Susan Ohanian at: susano@gmavt.net