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Cullen is a columnist for the *Boston Globe* City & Region section. He was appointed to that position in 2007. Previously he served as a projects reporter for the *Boston Globe* frequently writing for the *Globe*'s Foreign desk. His long-time beat was Northern Ireland, and in 1997 he opened the *Globe*'s Dublin bureau and later served as the *Globe*'s London bureau chief and European correspondent, covering the war in the former Yugoslavia. He has spent several stints on the *Globe*'s investigative unit, The Spotlight Team, and was a member of the investigative group that in 2003 won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. He is the co-author of two books, *Betrayal* and *Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined*. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003.

Richard Parker is Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy University. An economist by training, he is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Oxford University. He has worked as an economist for the UNDP, as co-founder of *Mother Jones Magazine*, and as head of his own consulting firm, serving congressional clients, including Senators Kennedy, Glenn, Cranston, and McGovern, among others. Parker has held Marshall, Rockefeller, Danforth, Goldsmith, and Bank of America Fellowships. His books include: The Myth of the Middle Class , a study of U.S. income distribution;Mixed Signals: The Future of Global Television News ; and the intellectual biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. His articles have appeared in numerous academic anthologies and journals and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Nation, Harper's, Le Monde, Atlantic Monthly, and International Economy, among others.

Prudence L. Carter is an associate professor in the School of Education and the Department of Sociology at Stanford. She teaches a range of courses on racial and ethnic relations, social and cultural inequality, the sociology of education, urban education and research methods. Professor Carter's first book, *Keepin' It Real: School Success beyond Black and White* (Oxford University Press 2005), is the 2006 co-winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, (Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, American Sociological Association) for its contribution to the eradication of racism; a 2005 finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award (Society for the Study of Social Problems); and an a 2007 honorable mention recipient of the distinguished book award (Section on Race, Class, and Gender, American Sociological Association). At present, Professor Carter is completing a book tentatively titled *The Paradoxes of Opportunity: Race, Culture, and Boundaries in "Good" Schools*, which documents a cross-national study of desegregated and majority-minority high schools in the United States and South Africa and examines how school practices can either facilitate or diminish academic and social divides in education.

Long's work applies the theory and methods of economics to examine various aspects of the market for higher education in the United States. Her research focuses on access and choice in higher education, the outcomes of college students, and the behavior of postsecondary institutions. Several of her research papers examine the enrollment and distributional effects of state and federal financial aid programs. In addition, Long has studied the effectiveness of postsecondary remediation and the impact of class size and faculty characteristics on student outcomes. Long received her doctorate and master's in economics from Harvard University and her bachelor's degree from Princeton University. She is a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and received the American Educational Research Association Dissertation Award. She was awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2002-2004, in July 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured her as one of the "New Voices" in higher education, and in 2008, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) awarded her the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award for excellence in research and published works on student financial assistance. She has received numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, the Ford Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Christopher N. Avery, Roy E. Larsen Professor of Public Policy, teaches analytic courses in microeconomics and statistics. His first book, The Early Admissions Game, coauthored with Andrew Fairbanks and Richard Zeckhauser, was published by Harvard University Press in March 2003. In his current research, he studies college application patterns and college enrollment choices for high school students.

Mike Barnicle is an award-winning writer and media personality. He is a political analyst for MSNBC and a frequent contributor, and occasional guest host, on the network's *Hardball with Chris Matthews* and *Morning Joe*. Barnicle can also been seen regularly on NBC's *Today Show*. A veteran print and broadcast journalist, he has written more than 4,000 columns collectively for the *Boston Herald*, *New York Daily News*, and *The Boston Globe*, where he rose to prominence with his biting, satirical, and at times, heart-wrenching columns that closely followed the triumphs, travails and ambitions of Boston's working and middle classes. He has also written articles and opinion pieces for *The Huffington Post*, Newsweek.com, *Esquire*, *George* and *ESPN Magazine*. Since 1982, Barnicle has been a regular contributor to WCVB-TV's nightly news show, *Chronicle*. His award-winning documentaries include *Armed and Dangerous*, which examined the proliferation of guns in the U.S., and *Justice on Trial*, an expose on the Massachusetts judicial system.

Jessica Hoffmann Davis is a cognitive developmental psychologist and founder of the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of *Framing Education as Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day *.

Richard Murnane, an economist, is Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In recent years he has pursued two lines of research. With MIT Professors Frank Levy and David Autor, he has examined how computer-based technological change has affected skill demands in the U.S. economy. Murnane and Levy have written two books on this topic. The second line of research examines the consequences of particular initiatives designed to improve the performance of the education sector. For example, along with HGSE colleagues, Murnane has examined the consequences of providing salary bonuses to attract skilled teachers to high-need schools and the impact that high-stakes tests for students has on the probability of high school graduation. Murnane is a graduate of Williams College and earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1974.

As a former restavec, I came to the United States at the age of fifteen to resume my restavec status in the home of my former "masters." When they realized that the restavec system was not conducive to American society, I was shown the door to fend for myself in the streets of New York. In *Restavec*, my autobiography, published by the University of Texas Press, I show the faces of the restavec children behind the mask. I vividly describe my childhood in restavec servitude as well as my subsequent life in the Unites States, where, despite American racism, I put myself through college and found success in the United States Army and in business. Today I am a high school teacher in Ohio.

Neal Pierce is an American writer and journalist specializing in metropolitan regions, their political and economic dynamics, and their emerging national and global roles.