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John C. Brittain
Judith Kafka

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University of the District of Columbia School of Law

Dr. Brittain is the Olie W. Rauh Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. Prior to joining UDC Law, he worked at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University and the University of Connecticut School of Law. He also served as Chief Counsel and Senior Deputy Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Dr. Brittain was one of the original counsel team in Sheff v. O’Neill (1996), has participated in filing nearly a dozen briefs in the United States Supreme Court, and was a member of a legal team that filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the NAACP in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education. He is presently a part of a legal team representing private plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the State of Maryland for denying Maryland’s HBCUs comparable and competitive opportunities with traditional White universities.

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Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY

Dr. Kafka uses a historical lens to examine the social, political, and institutional forces that shape American schooling. Her research focuses on urban education from the postwar era through today, and she is particularly interested in the ways in which educational policies serve to both interrupt and reinforce social and economic inequalities. Dr. Kafka’s book, The History of ‘Zero Tolerance’ in American Public Schooling, explores the intersection of race, politics, and bureaucracy in the context of school discipline, using the case of the Los Angeles City School District. Her scholarship has appeared in the Handbook of Research on Teaching, History of Education Quarterly, American Journal of Education, Peabody Journal of Education, and Teachers College Record. She is currently at work on a history of race, space and schooling in Brooklyn, from the nineteenth century through today.

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Preston Green
Adam Harris
Francesca López

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University of Connecticut

Dr. Green is a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut and the John and Maria Neag Professor of Urban Education at the Neag School. Dr. Green has written numerous books, articles, and policy briefs that address the legal dimensions of educational access and school choice. For instance, he has written about how legislatures can ensure that charter schools protect student rights. Dr. Green has also explained how policymakers can improve the financial oversight of charter school and voucher programs. He has also developed and coordinated numerous academic programs for educational law, including the UCAPP Law Program, the UConn School Law Online Graduate Certificate, Penn State's joint degree program in law and education, and the Law and Education Institute and Penn State.

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The Atlantic

Adam Harris is the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right, a narrative history of racial inequality in higher education and how the government is responsible for shaping it. He is working on his second book, Is This America?, a history of the South's role in politics—and how it continues to shape the nation. At The Atlantic, he writes about politics and education. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, Adam was a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education covering federal higher-education policy and HBCUs. He is a 2021 New America Fellow and the recipient of the Rising Star Award by the News Media Alliance. He has also worked at ProPublica. His writing has appeared in BBC, Bleacher Report, and EBONY Magazine, and he is a frequent guest on CBS News, MSNBC, and radio stations across the country.

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Penn State University

Dr. López is the Waterbury Chair in Equity Pedagogy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University. She began her career in education as a bilingual (Spanish/English) elementary teacher, and later as an at-risk high school counselor, in El Paso, Texas. Her research is focused on the ways educational settings promote achievement for Latino youth and has been funded by the American Educational Research Association Grants Program, the Division 15 American Psychological Association Early Career Award, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr. López is a National Education Policy Center Fellow, and was a Visiting Fellow for the Program for Transborder Communities at Arizona State University. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment and Contemporary Educational Psychology, and is currently senior associate editor for the American Journal of Education and co-editor of the American Educational Research Journal.

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