Education: The view from Martin Luther King's 'mountaintop'

Derrick P. Alridge is the Philip J. Gibson Professor in the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. A scholar of U.S. educational and intellectual history, he is the founding director of the Teachers in the Movement oral history project, through which he and his undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Virginia have conducted more than 500 interviews with civil rights–era teachers to explore their pedagogy during the movement. Alridge is the author and coeditor of several books and is currently developing Soul Work: An Oral History of Teachers in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond. Alridge holds a BA and MEd from Winthrop College and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University.

Emily M. Dickens serves as chief administrative officer for SHRM, the world’s largest HR trade association. She is frequently featured in top media outlets including CNN, CBS News, NBC News, AP News, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg Law, Crain’s, Marketplace, WTOP, and Yahoo Finance as a thought leader on workplace trends, HR leadership, and business policy. She has testified before Congress and the EEOC on topics such as artificial intelligence, gender bias, and paid leave, bringing SHRM’s expertise directly to policymakers. Dickens worked previously in higher education and nonprofit leadership, including serving as general counsel and head of policy for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, vice president of public policy for the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, and assistant vice president for federal affairs at the University of North Carolina system. She holds a BA, MA, and JD from North Carolina Central University.

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and also a professor at both the UVA School of Education and Human Development and the UVA Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She is an expert who speaks throughout the United States about K–12 educational equity, equal opportunity, civil rights, and federalism. Before Robinson began her career as a professor, she practiced law in the General Counsel’s office of the U.S. Department of Education and as an education litigation attorney with Hogan & Hartson law firm (now Hogan Lovells). She also served as a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the ninth circuit. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a JD from Harvard University.

Gerard Robinson, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is a professor of practice in public policy and law at the UVA Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy with a joint appointment at the UVA School of Law. His areas of expertise include K-12 and higher education, criminal justice reform, race in American institutions, and the role of nonprofit organizations in civil society. He has published essays on education, public policy, and crime and coedited Education Savings Accounts: The New Frontier in School Choice (2017) and Education for Liberation: The Politics of Promise and Reform Inside and Beyond America’s Prisons (2019). Robinson previously served as executive director of the Center for Advancing Opportunity, a Washington, D.C.-based research and education initiative. Robinson holds an AA from El Camino Community College, a BA from Howard University, and a Masters of Education from Harvard University.