Program Staff and Advisors

Nancy Pelz-Paget, Director of the Education and Society Program, is one of the founders of the Education and Society Program.  Ms. Pelz-Paget is engaged in the development and dissemination of new strategies for education and public policy.  The current Aspen program focus is on high school transformation and the multiple pathways and opportunities that young people need to succeed beyond high school in college, work and as effective citizens.  Through a combination of workshops involving practitioners, policy makers and research analysts, commissioning papers, and organizing networks of district and state leaders, the program has contributed to creating the framework of ideas and policies for what has rapidly become a national movement around high school transformation.

Ms. Pelz-Paget served as Director of Policy Programs, for the Council for Aid to Education, a subsidiary of the RAND Corporation, where she was responsible for organizing and executing policy forums with state, education and business leaders on reform in higher education.  She continues to serve as a consultant to the Council on the Leaders for Change program and the College Learning Assessment program in higher education. In addition, she serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Research, Evaluation and the Advancement of Teacher Education, a Consortium of Texas A&M University System and the UT System, the three largest producers of teachers in Texas; the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association; and the American Ditchley Foundation.
Contact: nancypp@aspeninstitute.org

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Judy Wurtzel is the senior fellow of the Education and Society Program.  Prior to joining the Institute, she served for six years as Executive Director of the Learning First Alliance. The Alliance is a permanent partnership of 12 leading educational associations with over 10 million members dedicated to improving public education. Judy worked with the CEOs, staff and elected leaders of Alliance member organizations, as well as with their state counterparts, to foster collective action.  Under Judy’s leadership, the Alliance issued action plans and studies representing its members’ views on critical education issues such as improving reading and mathematics achievement, creating safe and supportive learning communities, and supporting district-wide improvement strategies and spurred national and state collaborations across Alliance members.

Prior to joining the Alliance, Ms. Wurtzel spent six years as a senior advisor to Marshall (Mike) Smith, the Undersecretary and then acting Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, working on a range of elementary and secondary education including improving mathematics education and the education of students with disabilities and represented the Department in interagency efforts including welfare reform, empowerment zones, school-linked health services, and youth development.
Contact: judy.wurtzel@aspeninstitute.org

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Michael OKeefe, co-chair of the Education and Society Program, is president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.   OKeefe most recently served as commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, the states largest department with an annual budget of $6 billion and 6,700 employees.  The department supports a broad range of services, including health care, economic assistance, child welfare services, and services for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Prior to his tenure as human services commissioner, OKeefe spent ten years as executive vice president and chief executive officer for the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis.  The foundation provides grants in human services, housing, the arts and the environment and supports research in several areas as well as international projects.  He is the former president of the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education in Washington, D.C., has held a number of posts in higher education and government, and has served on numerous boards.
Contact: mok@mcad.edu

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Robert Schwartz,Academic Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Co-chair, Aspen Program on Education, has since 1996 been a lecturer on education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he currently directs the Education and Management Program. From 1997-2002 he also served as founding President of Achieve, Inc., an independent, bipartisan, non-profit organization created by the nation’s governors and corporate leaders to help states raise standards and improve performance in the schools.  In its first five years Achieve conducted benchmarking studies of state standards, tests, and related education policies for 16 states; organized an interstate consortium to strengthen middle grades mathematics education; launched the American Diploma Project, an initiative with three other national organizations and five states to close the gap between high school exit requirements in reading, writing and mathematics and the real-world demands of colleges and high-skills workplaces; and hosted two National Education Summits.

Over the past four decades, Mr. Schwartz has worked in a variety of roles in education and government.  He has been a high school English teacher and principal; an education advisor to the Mayor of Boston and the Governor of Massachusetts; an assistant director of the National Institute of Education; a special assistant to the President of the University of Massachusetts; and Executive Director of The Boston Compact, a public-private partnership designed to improve access to higher education and employment for urban high school graduates.

From 1990 to 1996, Schwartz directed the education grant making program of The Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the nations' largest private philanthropies.  Among the major reform projects initiated during his tenure at the Trusts were New Standards, a voluntary national system of student performance standards and assessments developed jointly by the University of Pittsburgh, the National Center of Education and the Economy, and 17 partner states; Community Compacts for Student Success, a six city K-16 systemic reform effort to increase the enrollment and success rates of disadvantaged students in higher education; and the National Youth Apprenticeship Initiative, a policy, research and technical assistance initiative developed by Jobs for the Future aimed at promoting better national, state and local policies and programs to prepare young people for work and further learning.

Mr. Schwartz has written and spoken widely on such topics as standards-based reform, public-private partnerships, school-to-work, and the role of higher education in K-12 reform.  He currently serves on the boards of The Education Trust, Teachers 21, and the National Academy of Science’s Center for Education, and on advisory committees for The Boston Foundation, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and the Public Education Network.  He has degrees from Harvard College and Brandeis University.

Contact: robert_schwartz@gse.harvard.edu

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Michael Timpane, former co-chair of the Education and Society Program, serves as senior advisor, bringing a wealth of knowledge, perspective and expertise on teacher policy issues.  Michael Timpane was recently Senior Education Advisor at RAND and previously served as president of Teachers College and as Director of the National Institute of Education.  As a key consultant to the program, Timpane works on planning, identifying intellectual and human resources as well as moderating some of the program workshops.  He is currently advisor to the Carnegie Corporation Teachers for a New Era program.
Contact: timpanes@aol.com

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Christopher T. Cross, a partner in the Education and Society Program, serve as Project Director and Project Associate, respectively, for the Aspen Senior Congressional Education Staff Program. Both Cross and Joftus have had experience on Congressional staffs or working with them and are widely respected for their work both there and after leaving the Hill. Their firm is an education policy consulting practice dedicated to providing education leaders with personalized and expert assistance in policy analysis and development, evaluation, strategic planning, and communication strategies.

In addition to his work with Cross & Joftus, Mr. Cross is a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Education Commission of the States. Mr. Cross also serves as a consultant to the Broad Foundation and the C.S. Mott Foundation. He is a member of the advisory board for the School Evaluation Service program of Standard and Poor's.

From 1994 to 2002 he served as president and chief executive officer of the Council for Basic Education (CBE). Before joining CBE, Mr. Cross served as Director of the Education Initiative of The Business Roundtable and as Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. He was Republican Staff Director and Senior Education Consultant for the House Committee on Education and Labor from 1972-1978 and was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education Legislation from l970-1972.
Mr. Cross chaired the National Assessment of Title I Independent Review Panel on Evaluation for the U.S. Department of Education from 1995-2001 and the National Research Council Panel on Minority Representation in Special Education from 1997-2002. He was a member of the National Education Commission on Time and Learning.

Mr. Cross is a member of the board of directors of the American Institutes for Research and on the board of trustees of Whittier College. He also serves on the board of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, The New Teacher Project and EdSource and in March 2002 facilitated the negotiated rule-making process on Title I for the U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Cross has written extensively in the education and public policy areas and has been published in numerous scholarly and technical publications, including Education Week, Kappan, The College Board Review, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. And he is editor of "Putting the Pieces Together," a book on comprehensive school reform, published in 2004 by the George Washington University Press.

Mr. Cross' book (Political Education: National Policy Comes of Age) on the people and events that have shaped federal K-12 education policy from the time of the Eisenhower administration through the passage last year of the 2001 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was published in November 2003 by Teachers College Press. He is also the co-editor of Minorities in Gifted and Special Education, published in 2002 by the National Academies Press. He has lectured on American education issues in Hong Kong, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

Scott Joftus, serves as the project associate for the Congressional Seminar Program. Dr. Joftus served as the policy director for the Alliance for Excellent Education where he helped to develop the policy agenda for the newly created policy organization focused on ensuring that all students graduate high school prepared for college (see attachment for a complete vita). Previously, Dr. Joftus was the director of policy, research, and evaluation for The McKenzie Group, an education policy consulting firm, where he conducted numerous evaluations for and provided technical assistance to the U.S. Department of Education, and districts and states across the country. Dr. Joftus has also served as a senior associate at the Council for Basic Education, an elementary school teacher as the first-ever corps of Teach for America, and a strategic planning consultant to the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank based in San Francisco focused on California policy.
Contact: ctcross@sbcglobal.net and scott@edstrategies.net

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Mindy Hernandez, Research Director, Education and Society Program. Before joining the Aspen Institute, Mindy worked with the Education Division at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Her work focused on urban school reform in general and Carnegie's large reform initiative, Schools for a New Society, in particular. Prior to joining Carnegie, Ms. Hernandez worked with For Love of Children's (FLOC) Neighborhood Tutoring Program, an organization that serves at-risk children in Washington, DC. She managed the literacy initiative of the Neighborhood Tutoring Program, which involved curriculum design and program evaluation. Mindy now sits on the Board of Directors of FLOC.

Mindy's background also includes a stint in the AmeriCorps VISTA program where she designed an English-language after-school program for children in low-income Puerto Rican communities, a summer spent in Kolkata, India where she conducted research on sex trafficking legislation and work on the Hill in the office of U.S. Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA).

Contact: mindy.hernandez@aspeninstitute.org

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The Program also benefits from advice from numerous other individuals and organizations including Tony Bryk, Stanford University, School of Education, and Warren Simmons, Executive Director, Annenberg Institute for School Reform who serve as key advisors for the Aspen Urban Superintendents network.