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James Peyser is a partner with NewSchools Venture Fund and serves as chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, a position he has held since 1999. He is also chairman of the Educational Management Audit Council. Prior to joining NewSchools, Peyser served as education advisor to Governors Mitt Romney and Jane Swift. He also worked for eight years as Executive Director of Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research. During his tenure at Pioneer, Peyser took a four month leave of absence to serve as Under Secretary of Education and Special Assistant to Governor William Weld for Charter Schools. Peyser is a member of the board of overseers of WGBH and is a former member of the board of directors of Boston Partners in Education. He also serves on the policy board of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Kirk has produced more than 200 national television programs. A former Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University, Kirk was the senior producer of *FRONTLINE* from the series' inception in 1983 until the fall of 1987, when he created his own production company, The Kirk Documentary Group. His most recent *FRONTLINE* productions include three investigations of the recent financial crisis--*The Warning*, the unique story of a regulator's warning about the dangers of derivatives in the 1990s, *Breaking the Bank*, an inside look into the complicated financial and political web threatening superbank Bank of America, *Inside the Meltdown*, a major investigation into the collapse of the American economy. In 2008 Kirk produced *The Choice*, an examination of the political and personal biographies of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. In the spring of 2008 he produced, directed and wrote, the four and a half hour, two-part special *Bush's War* (EMMY Award). He has produced 10 films on the "war on terror" including *Cheney's Law* (Peabody Award), *Endgame*, *The Lost Year in Iraq* (EMMY Award), *Rumsfeld's War*, *The Torture Question* (EMMY Award), *The Dark Side*, *The War Behind Closed Doors*, an analysis of the political infighting that led to the war with Iraq; and *The Man Who Knew*, the extraordinary saga of FBI Agent John O'Neil. Kirk's long relationship with *FRONTLINE* also includes the Peabody Award-winning *Waco--The Inside Story*, (1995) a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound; and the EMMY Award-winning *The Kevorkian File*, (1994) an in-depth examination of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's controversial record and cases. Kirk also produces programs that concentrate on social and cultural issues in America. *Caring for Your Parents* tells the story of five families caring for their elderly parents; *Navy Blues* (EMMY award) examines gender politics in the military; *The Way the Music Died* a behind-the-scenes report on the recording industry; and the groundbreaking *Misunderstood Minds*, a two-year examination of the personal stories of five families confronting the challenges of a child's learning disabilities.

Kirk Wolter, Ph.D., is Executive Vice President, Survey Research, with the National Opinion Research Center, an affiliate of the University of Chicago, and is also Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago. During his career, he has led or participated in the design of many of America's largest and most important information systems, including the Current Business Surveys, the Current Employment Statistics program, the Current Population Survey, the 1980 and 1990 Decennial Censuses, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and the National Resources Inventory. Wolter is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on the Design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments and a charter member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee. He recently completed service on National Academy of Sciences panels on federal business statistics and on cost-of-living indexes. He is author of *Introduction to Variance Estimation*, a standard work in its field, and has published numerous articles in refereed statistical journals. Wolter has received extensive recognition for his work, including the U.S. Department of Commerce's silver and bronze medals. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and past President of the International Association of Survey Statisticians and of the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association. His Ph.D. in Statistics is from Iowa State University.

George Mitchell became familiar with the workings of the U.S. Senate in the 1960s, when he served as executive assistant to Democratic senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. In 1980, when Muskie resigned to become secretary of state, Mitchell was appointed to fill the vacancy. As a senator, he became a leading figure for the Democratic Party, and was credited with helping his party win back the majority in the Senate in 1986. Senator Mitchell was elected majority leader in 1989, a position he held until his retirement from the Senate in 1995. He was known among his colleagues in the Senate as an honest leader and skillful legislative strategist. After leaving the Senate, Mitchell was instrumental in negotiating a peace agreement in Northern Ireland and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Senator Mitchell returned to the Senate in 1999 to participate in the Leader's Lecture Series.