Danielle’s work to make the world better for young people has taken her from teaching college and leading a $60 million university division to driving change at the helm of a $6 billion foundation, writing as a national opinion columnist, advocating for cannabis legalization, public health policy, democracy renovation, civic education, and sound governance of and with new technology. During the height of COVID in 2020, Danielle’s leadership in rallying coalitions and building solutions resulted in the country’s first-ever Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience; her policies were adopted in federal legislation and a presidential executive order. She was the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize, which recognizes scholarly achievement in the disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize. She received the Prize “for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education.” She was a lead author on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a framework for securing excellence in history and civic education for all learners, K-12, released in 2021. During 2020 to 2022, Danielle ran for governor of Massachusetts, making history as the first Black woman ever to run for statewide office in Massachusetts.

A past chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize Board, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. As a scholar, she currently concentrates on the GETTING-Plurality research network (focused on tech governance and AI ethics); the Democratic Knowledge Project and Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative, housed at the Safra Center; on the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, housed at Harvard’s Ash Center; and on the Our Common Purpose Commission at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Learning from the natural sciences, she has built a lab to extend the impact of work in the humanities and social sciences.

Her many books include the widely acclaimed Our Declaration: A reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality; Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.; Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus; and Justice by Means of Democracy. Her many edited volumes include From Voice to Influence: Understanding citizenship in a digital ageand A Political Economy of Justice. She writes a column on constitutional democracy for The Washington Post.

Outside the university, Danielle is founder and president of Partners In Democracy, where she continues to advocate for democracy reform to create greater voice and access in our democracy, and drive progress toward a new social contract that serves and includes us all. She also serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, Cambridge Health Alliance, New America, FairVote, and the Democracy Fund. For more, check out Danielle’s personal website.

Read Less

A magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina, Provost Bracey received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he served as a supervising editor on the Harvard Law Review, a general editor on the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, and an editor on the Harvard Blackletter Law Journal. He clerked for the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and subsequently joined the Washington, DC, Office of Jenner & Block, where he litigated a variety of civil and criminal matters.

Provost Bracey previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Washington University School of Law before joining the GW Law faculty in 2008. He previously served as senior associate dean and interim dean of GW Law, as well as vice provost for faculty affairs.

Provost Bracey has delivered lectures and presentations on a variety of topics involving race relations, constitutional rights, and celebrity trials, as well as general criminal justice matters and U.S. politics. He has been interviewed and featured in several hundred media articles and broadcasts, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Salon Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Essence Magazine, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, BBC, and NPR. He is the author of Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice (Beacon Press 2008) and co-author of The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Ohio University Press 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in a number of leading law reviews, including Northwestern University Law Review, University of Southern California Law Review, Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of Law and Criminology, and Alabama Law Review, among others.

Read Less

Secretary Cardona’s focus throughout his career on raising the bar for equity and excellence for all learners guides his leadership of the agency in service of the nation’s 65 million students and families. Secretary Cardona oversaw efforts to safely reopen schools for in-person learning, going from only 46% of school buildings open when President Biden took office to nearly 100% open just nine months later, while distributing historic federal education funding for P-12 schools and colleges; working to increase higher education access, affordability, and student success; and leading unprecedented federal efforts to transform the country’s student loan system. Across all of these priorities, Secretary Cardona has highlighted the urgency of seizing the moment through intentional collaboration – and the opportunity we have not only to recover from the pandemic, but to reimagine a more equitable education system that works better for all. He and his wife Marissa are proud parents of one student in public high school and another in college.

Read Less

A New Hampshire native, Thomas moved to Massachusetts to pursue his teaching degree. He graduated magna cum laude from Lesley University in 2011 and earned his Masters in Education in Curriculum and Instruction from Fitchburg State University in 2020. Thomas has spent three of the last four years as a pilot educator for the Democratic Knowledge Project’s civics curriculum.

Read Less

Previously, Louise served as Managing Director of Digital Learning at WGBH where she helped launch PBS Learning Media, a platform reaching more than 1.5 million educators. Before WGBH, Louise had a successful career in educational publishing and instructional technology for more than 20 years. In the early 1990s, Louise served as a co-founder of CASES, a New York alternative-to-incarceration program where education helps reshape lives.

Louise is the winner of the 2017 People’s Voice award from the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, and was also recognized as a 2019 Donaldson Fellow by the Yale School of Management. She began her career as an attorney in Montreal, Canada, and holds a law degree from McGill University, as well as an MBA from Yale University.

Read Less

Trent decided to become more involved in politics after meeting the Governor of Iowa, in whose office he later interned. Afterwards, he was recruited to be a Field Organizer during the 2022 election season. Trent supported candidates in three Iowa counties and attended regular and special party meetings in all three counties. During the 90th Iowa General Assembly, Trent accepted a position as Double Clerk to offer administrative support for two Iowa House Representatives.

Trent is currently enrolled at the University of Iowa with an emphasis in Political Science and is inspired now to dedicate his talents to public service. He is participating in the Reagan Institute Civic Leaders Fellowship to honor the memory of President Reagan and contribute to President Reagan’s vision of inspiring youth to create a positive future for the nation.

Read Less

Feuer’s research has focused on the economics of education, international comparative assessments, teacher preparation, inequality and academic opportunity, science policy, use of research to inform policy, philanthropy, and civics education. In addition to many edited volumes and journal articles, Feuer is the author of Moderating the Debate: Rationality and the Promise of American Education (2006) abd The Rising Price of Objectivity: Philanthropy, Government, and the Future of Education Research (2016), both published by Harvard Education Press. His third book, Can Schools Save Democracy? Civic Education and the Common Good, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2023.

Feuer’s essays, commentaries, book reviews, and poems have appeared in newspapers, blogs, and magazines in the US and abroad. Recent essays have addressed the role of social science in pandemic models, risk assessment, and the condition of education in the West Bank and Gaza. He consults to governments and research organizations in Europe, Israel, and elsewhere. He is also the host of the education podcast, EdFix.

Feuer received his B.A. in English from Queens College (CUNY), an M.A. in public management from the Wharton School, and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been on the faculty of Drexel University and Georgetown. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Regine, a physician certified in both ob-gyn and addiction medicine. The Feuers have two grown children.

Read Less

Before joining the Youngkin Administration, Aimee was a strategic consultant helping states, foundations, companies and nonprofit organizations strengthen their efforts to improve student learning and outcomes. Prior to launching her consultancy, Aimee was Founder, President and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign (DQC), a national, nonprofit advocacy organization leading the effort to ensure that students, parents, educators, and policymakers have the right information to guide their actions so that every student can excel.

A respected thought leader in education, Aimee was named one of TIME’s 12 Education Activists of 2012. She has also been cited as an expert on education policy and the value of education data by publications such as Business Week, NPR, and Education Week. Aimee is a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow, American Enterprise Institute Fellow, and an alumna of the Institute for Educational Leadership’s Education Policy Fellowship Program. She has served on the board of directors of the American Succeeds, Institute for Educational Leadership, Policy Innovators in Education Network, the Friends of the Hennepin County Library, Minnesota Comeback, Conservative Leaders for Education, and on the advisory board for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard.

Before founding DQC, Aimee served as the director of the Washington, D.C., office of the National Center for Educational Achievement. She previously served as vice president of programs for the National Alliance of Business (NAB), worked in the education division of the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices, and taught for the Japanese Ministry of Education.

Read Less

She holds an Ed.M. in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a focus towards global education and citizenship for the 21st century, monitoring and evaluation for improving education systems, and applied data analysis. She also has a background in economics and anthropology. Noorya is passionately interested in narrowing gaps in civic education, awareness, and life-opportunities for underresourced communities by providing evidence-backed research for decision-making and policies.

Read Less

Healy chaired the Illinois Task Force on Civic Education in 2014 and later led separate, successful legislative campaigns for a required civics course in Illinois in middle and high school, respectively. He also led the Illinois Social Science Standards Task Force. Its recommendations were adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education in 2015.

Healy makes regular appearances as a guest speaker and panelist at academic and professional development conferences across the country, is a frequent contributor to local and national media, and produces original scholarship in the area of political participation and civic education. Healy also serves as an adjunct professor in Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a Serve Illinois Commissioner.

Before joining iCivics, Healy worked for fifteen years at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation in various capacities, most recently serving as Democracy Program Director. He began his career as a social studies teacher at West Chicago Community High School (IL) and Sheboygan North High School (WI). A 2001 James Madison Fellow from the State of Wisconsin, he holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in political science and earned a B.A. with distinction in Political Science, History and Secondary Education from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His dissertation is titled, “Essential School Supports for Civic Learning.”

Read Less

Her stories examine the crisis of misinformation in topics such as election integrity, climate change, geopolitical conflicts and more. She always wants to know more about why people believe what they believe, and how those beliefs can have repercussions.

Tiffany has been a journalist for more than two decades, most recently covering media before joining the disinformation team in 2022. She came to The Times in 2017 and was a business reporter for The Los Angeles Times for several years before that. She got her start at publications such as The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and The Daily Californian (the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley).

Currently, Tiffany is based in Northern California. In 2022, she won a Mirror Award for work with Sheera Frenkel on false narratives about Covid vaccines. One day, she hopes to write about her great passion: fried chicken.

Read Less

Professor Kahne was Chair of the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network. Kahne was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. He currently chairs the Educating for American Democracy Research Task Force. Professor Kahne is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He can be reached at jkahne@ucr.edu and his work is available at https://www.civicsurvey.org/

Read Less

Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He was later appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. In 2020, Liu was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves on its Trust and is co-chair of its Our Common Purpose commission on democratic citizenship. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, and a member of the Yale University Council. Liu and his family live in Seattle, where he has served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Washington State Board of Education, and co-founded the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. His work as a civic innovator was recognized in 2020 with an Ashoka Fellowship.

Read Less

Lowe has served in a variety of leadership roles nationally, most recently as a member of the University of Arizona Alumni Association Governing Board and of the Challenge Leadership Group for the MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship. She has served on the board of the National Indian Education Association and as a trustee on the board for the National Museum of the American Indian.

Lowe holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a Master of Arts in American Indian Studies, and has completed doctoral coursework in Higher Education from the University of Arizona.

Follow Chair Lowe on Twitter: @NEHchair

Read Less

Active in professional organizations that work to advance and strengthen the philanthropic and nonprofit world, Mannion is a former cochair of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, an affinity group of funders that encourages foundations to fund voter registration, voting rights, civic education and campaign finance reform. She remains an active participant in this organization. She is also a member of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees. In 2009, Mannion, together with her colleague Taryn Higashi, received the Robert W. Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking, one of philanthropy’s highest honors, for founding the Four Freedoms Fund, a funder collaborative housed at NEO Philanthropy that works to increase capacity in immigrant communities at the state level. In 2010, she was named as one of the nonprofit sector’s top 50 leaders by the NonProfit Times. Since 2014, Mannion has chaired the Council on Foundations’ Scrivner Selection Committee.

Mannion holds a BA in English and an MA in political science, both from Fordham University.

Read Less

In 2010, Nathan was named Kansas and National History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. Nathan has also been named a Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Master Teacher Fellow, Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes, Fellow, and a George Washington Library, Lifeguard Teacher Fellow. He currently serves on the boards of several state and national organizations, including the Kansas Council for History Education, and the iCivics National Educators Network.

Read Less

In 2022, under Patton’s leadership, Middlebury received a $25M grant to begin the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation—the largest programmatic grant ever received in the College’s history. The initiative views the study and development of conflict transformation skills as a liberal art, and supports wide-ranging initiatives in high-school, undergraduate, graduate, global, and experiential learning, where students learn and practice different approaches to conflict management and resolution.

In 2020, her team launched the new residential learning program, Compass. Now in its pilot phase, Compass takes the core elements of Middlebury’s entrepreneurship programs, including a focus on mentorship, creativity, financial literacy, and networking, and makes them accessible to all students. Under her leadership in the pandemic year, Middlebury had one of the lowest rates of COVID-positive cases in the nation.

In 2019, she announced Energy2028, Middlebury’s bold plan to address the threat of climate change after its achievement of carbon neutrality in 2016. Energy2028 has put the institution on the path toward a complete shift to renewable energy.

In 2016 Patton launched Envisioning Middlebury, the planning effort that created a strategic framework to guide the institution over the coming decade. The plan was adopted by the trustees in October 2017.

Patton is an authority on South Asian history, culture, and religion, and religion in the public square. She is the author or editor of 10 books and more than 60 articles and has translated the classical Sanskrit text The Bhagavad Gita. She is also the author of three books of poems, most recently House Crossing in 2018 from Station Hill Press.

From 1996 to 2011, Patton served on the faculty and administration at Emory University, where she was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Religions and the inaugural director of Emory’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence in the Office of the Provost. Patton began her career at Bard College, where she was assistant professor of Asian religions from 1991 to 1996.

Patton earned her BA from Harvard University in 1983 and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1991. She has served as president of the American Society for the Study of Religion in 2011, and the American Academy of Religion, made up of over 9,000 members, in 2019. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 in two categories: philosophy and religion, and educational leadership.

Read Less

In her current position, Ms. Sanchez designs and leads numerous initiatives to leverage public media’s content, distribution, and local community-based work to address critical needs in education today. The American Graduate Initiative supports local stations and national producers to partner with community-based organizations, businesses, and education organizations to raise awareness about the importance of high school graduation, post-secondary opportunities and preparing young people for the changing workforce. She led the development of an initiative focused on media by, with and for youth (children ages 8-18), which funded the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to investigate the media habits of children ages 8-18 and identify how public media can reach and adapt to young people’s evolving media practices.

Since 2005, CPB and PBS have been awarded funds through the U.S. Department of Education for the Ready To Learn (RTL) grant, which leverages public media’s esteemed collection of educational content to help close the achievement gap for children in low-income communities. Under Deb’s leadership, CPB supports innovative, digital approaches to bring content and resources to teachers and students through classroom-based approaches, including new U.S. History and Civics resource collections on the PBS LearningMedia platform. These collections, informed by teachers and expert advisors, focus on the key knowledge and skills that students need to participate in civic life today.

Read Less

As a Latin, first-generation student, she is deeply invested in making impactful contributions to our society through policy, research, and community engagement. Currently, she is a Fellow of the Ronald Reagan Institute Civic Leadership Program. She also has experience in local legislation through her work at the Riverside Juvenile Courthouse and the Riverside County Office of Education and Civic Leadership. Additionally, Vivian’s work as an Eco-Tourism Researcher in Costa Rica has allowed her to understand the intricacies and significance of international Politics. She is committed to applying her knowledge and experiences toward shaping effective public policy and aims to do so through a professional career in policy advising.

Read Less

Most recently, Dr. Shogan served as Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association. She previously worked in the United States Senate and as a senior executive at the Library of Congress. Dr. Shogan was the Vice Chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation. She taught at Georgetown University in the Government Department and moderated seminars for the Aspen Institute. She is the previous President of the National Capital Area Political Science Association and served on the American Political Science Association Council, the governing body of the organization. Her research focuses on the American Presidency, Presidential rhetoric, women in politics, and Congress.

A native of the Pittsburgh area, Dr. Shogan holds a BA in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Order of the Cross and Crown, and the Washington, D.C. Literary Society.

Read Less

Outside of his classroom, Staten is currently partnering as an educational consultant with David Garrigus’s upcoming film, 1787: The American Constitution, and has previously moderated events for the Center for Education Reform’s “Why America?” events at the National Archives, the National Theater, and the Pentagon.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Political Science, Staten has designed Civics, Government, and U.S. History programs that have been implemented across his school network, including engaging lessons, curricula, and a living history classroom based on classical political texts such as Hammurabi’s Code, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution to explore the ideas, cultures, and civilizations that influenced the growth and development of the United States.

Before becoming a teacher, Staten worked for two campaigns and briefly served as a lobbyist for the American Astronomical Society.

Read Less

Raj has dedicated his life to initiatives that help American citizens from all walks of life to become productive and engaged members of society. Early in his career, Raj co-founded the SEED Foundation, the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children. The SEED schools were featured in both television and film, and Raj won multiple awards for his work with SEED, including Harvard University’s Innovation in American Government Award, Fast Company/Monitor Group’s Social Capitalist Award, and Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life Award. Raj continues to serve on the Board of Directors for SEED.

Before joining the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, Raj served as Executive Vice-President of the Aspen Institute. In this role, he launched and led the new Youth & Engagement Programs division devoted to youth leadership development, civic engagement, and opportunity.

Raj currently co-chairs the Civics and Civic Engagement Taskforce for the United States Congress Semiquincentennial Commission celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. Raj also co-chairs the Civic Learning Pillar of the Partnership for American Democracy, a coalition of American leaders directing resources and attention toward efforts to save U.S. democracy, and serves on the advisory committee for Citizen Data.

He is the author of From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem and has spoken on civic engagement to the Fordham Institute, Results for America, and the ASU GSV Summit. He regularly appears on media outlets such as NBC, CBS, and The Bulwark.

Raj grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the child of Indian immigrants who instilled in him the faith that a good education could open doors to great things. He graduated from Princeton University and is a recipient of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award, the university’s highest honor for undergraduate alumni.

Read Less

Wineburg’s work focuses on how people judge the credibility of digital information, research that has been reported in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time Magazine, BBC, and Die Zeit, and translated into dozens of languages. His research articles and opinion pieces have appeared in outlets as diverse as Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.

His 2002 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.”

In 2015 he was inducted into the National Academy of Education, and in 2020 he was awarded UNESCO’s “Global Media and Information” prize. His latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, is titled Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University and an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Umeå University.

Read Less

Her recent work at RAND has focused on the policies and practices that enhance educator well-being and retention, the characteristics of coherent instructional systems, and the impacts of political polarization on educators’ working conditions and instructional practices.

Prior to joining Pardee RAND, Woo was an elementary school teacher. She has a B.A. in political economy and a minor in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Read Less

Zimmerman’s academic work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly. He is also a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and other popular newspapers and magazines.

Zimmerman came to the Penn Graduate School of Education after 20 years at New York University, where he served as chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Zimmerman received NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Award, its highest recognition for teaching. His former Ph.D. students have held positions at Carleton College, George Mason University, Brown University, and many other institutions.

Zimmerman has received book and article prizes from the American Educational Research Association, the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, and the History of Education Society, where he served as president in 2009–2010. He is co-editor of the Histories of American Education book series at Cornell University Press and also of the History and Philosophy of Education series at the University of Chicago Press. He has received several research awards from the Spencer Foundation, which also supported a kickoff conference for his University of Chicago book series.

Zimmerman recently completed The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in October 2020. Drawing upon student evaluations and other manuscript materials in dozens of university archives, the book provides our first in-depth examination of how undergraduate teaching practices in the United States took root and changed over time. He is also the author of Free Speech, and Why You Should Give a Damn (City of Light Press, April 2021), which features drawings by the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson. Most recently, Zimmerman published a revised 20th-anniversary edition of his 2002 book Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (University of Chicago Press, September 2022). The new edition examines debates over Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and other contemporary conflicts over the school curriculum. Zimmerman is currently researching a book about how American schools and universities have experienced and addressed health epidemics over the past two centuries.

Read Less