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Allistair Witten is an educator from Cape Town, South Africa. He is currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a teaching fellow at Harvard's Principals' Center where he assists with the training and development of aspiring principals. Mr. Witten has been an educator for twenty-two years in South Africa's township schools, and spent the last ten of these as school principal. Recently, Witten has focused on extending the functions of schools and making them sites for community development and transformation. His work has contributed to the Safe Schools Program in Cape Town, which adopts a community-oriented approach to engaging problems that negatively affect the functioning of schools.

**Howard Gardner** is Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of more than thirty books.

Jane Waldfogel, professor of Social Work and Public Policy at Columbia University, is co-editor of a recent volume, Stalled Gains and Steady Progress, which tracks trends in the black-white test score gap and offers explanations for uneven patterns of progress.

Ronald F. Ferguson is an MIT-trained economist who focuses social science research on economic, social, and educational challenges. He has been on the faculty at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1983, after full time appointments at Brandeis and Brown Universities. In 2014, he co-founded Tripod Education Partners and shifted into an adjunct role at the Kennedy School, where he remains a fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and faculty director of the university-wide Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI). During the 1980s and ’90s Ron focused much of his attention on economic and community development. That work culminated in the social science synthesis volume Urban Problems and Community Development (1999), which remains an important text in graduate policy courses. By the late 1980s, he had begun to study education and youth development because academic skill disparities were contributing to growing wage disparity. During the 1990s and early 2000s, his writings on the topic appeared in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, and various books and journals. In December 2007, Harvard Education Press published his book \_Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap\_. A February 2011 profile of Ron in the New York Times wrote, “there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.” Ron’s current focus as AGI director is an initiative entitled the Boston Basics that is spreading to other cities in a Basics National Network. It takes a socio-ecological saturation approach, collaborating with many partners to reach extended families with caregiving advice for infants and toddlers. In addition, Ron is co-authoring a book with journalist Tatsha Robertson on the ways that highly successful people were parented. Ron holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from MIT, both in economics. He has been happily married for 39 years and is the father of two adult sons.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor and Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is the author of several *New York Times* best-sellers, including *No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt*, which was awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in History and her latest book, *Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln*. She is the recipient of the Charles Frankel Prize and the Sara Josepha Hale Medal. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room and has been a consultant and on air-person for PBS documentaries on Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and Ken Burns' *The History of Baseball*. Currently an NBC News analyst, Ms. Goodwin lives in Massachusetts.