Paul Reville is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He is the founding director of HGSE's Education Redesign Lab. He recently completed nearly five years of service as the Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of . As Governor Patrick's top education adviser, Reville established a new Executive Office of Education and had oversight of higher education, K-12, and early education in the nation's leading student achievement state. He served in the Governor's Cabinet and played a leading education reform role on matters ranging from the Achievement Gap Act of 2010 and Common Core State Standards to the Commonwealth's highly successful Race to the Top proposal.

Prior to joining the Patrick Administration, Reville had chaired the Massachusetts State Board of Education, founded the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, co-founded the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), chaired the Massachusetts Reform Review Commission, chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Time and Learning, and served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, a national think tank which convened the U.S.'s leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to set the national standards agenda. Reville played a central role in MBAE's development of and advocacy for Massachusetts historic Education Reform Act of 1993. Reville has been a member of the HGSE faculty since 1997 and has served as director of the Education Policy and Management Program.

Reville's career, which combines research, policy, and practice, began with service as a VISTA volunteer/youth worker. He served as a teacher and principal of two urban, alternative high schools. Some years later, he founded a local education foundation which was part of the Public Education Network. He is a board member and adviser to a host of organizations, and a frequent writer and speaker on education reform and policy issues. He holds a B.A. from Colorado College, an M.A. from Stanford University and five honorary doctorate degrees.

Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey is President of Say Yes to Education. Say Yes is a national nonprofit that galvanizes communities by partnering with them to help give every public high school graduate access to a college or other post-secondary scholarship. Say Yes also works with communities to set milestones along the pathway to post-secondary readiness, and to organize and deliver supports and services intended to eliminate predictable barriers to achievement, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds.

For six years Schmitt-Carey was President and Chief Executive Officer of New American Schools, which merged with American Institutes for Research, helping that nonprofit grow from a pilot to the model for Comprehensive School Reform, a national school improvement program.

During 11 years at New American Schools, Schmitt-Carey also served as Chief Operating Officer, Vice President, and Director of Communications and Public Policy. She was previously Director of the Goals 2000 Community Project at the U.S. Department of Education, where she created and managed a support network for communities seeking to improve education.

In 2012, Schmitt-Carey was appointed to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission, which was charged with making recommendations for boosting student achievement and for making education spending more efficient in State. She earned her master’s from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude from SUNY Albany with a bachelor’s in political science and English.

Ronald Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership and is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. Heifetz speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations throughout the world. He co-developed the adaptive leadership framework.

His first book, Leadership without Easy Answers, (1994) is a classic in the field. Read widely as a foundational text, it is one of the 10 most assigned course books at Harvard and Duke Universities. He coauthored the best-selling Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading with Marty Linsky (2002), which serves as one of the primary go-to book for practitioners across all sectors, and the field book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organization and the World,(2009) with Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow.

Heifetz is also well-known for developing transformative methods of leadership education and development. His courses on leadership at Harvard are legendary. Drawing students from throughout Harvard’s graduate schools and neighboring universities, they have consistently won the alumni award for the Kennedy School’s most influential course. His teaching methods are the subject of the book, Leadership Can Be Taught, by Sharon Daloz Parks (Harvard Business Press, 2005).

A graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, and the Kennedy School, Heifetz is a physician and cellist. He trained initially in surgery before deciding to devote himself to the study of leadership in public affairs and business. Heifetz completed his medical training in psychiatry. As a cellist, he was privileged to have studied with the great Russian virtuoso, Gregor Piatigorsky