The pandemic's lasting effect on education

Melody Barnes is co-director for policy and public affairs for the Democracy Initiative, an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and engagement effort led by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the Dorothy Danforth Compton Professor and a professor of practice at the Miller Center and is also a distinguished fellow at the UVA School of Law. A co-founder of the domestic strategy firm MB2 Solutions LLC, Barnes has spent more than 25 years crafting public policy on a wide range of domestic issues. 

During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She was also executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her experience includes an appointment as director of legislative affairs for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling in New York City. 

Robert Pianta, PhD, is dean of the Curry School of Education and Human Development, Novartis US Foundation Professor of Education, professor of psychology, and founding director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia. Dr. Pianta‘s research and policy interests focus on the intersection of education and human development. In particular his work has advanced conceptualization and measurement of teacher-student relationships and documented their contributions to students’ learning and development. Dr. Pianta has led research and development on measurement tool and interventions that help teachers interact with students more effectively and that are used widely in the United States and around the world. Dr. Pianta received a BS and an MA in Special Education from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota. He began his career as a special education teacher and joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1986. He is past Editor of the Journal of School Psychology and associate editor for AERA Open. An internationally recognized expert in both early childhood education and K-12 teaching and learning, Dr. Pianta regularly consults with federal agencies, foundations, universities, and governments. He was named a Fellow of the American Education Research Association and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota in 2016.

Kimberly J. Robinson, UVA's Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor of Law and a professor of education at the Curry School, is a national expert who speaks domestically and internationally about educational equity, equal educational opportunity, civil rights, and the federal role in education. Her scholarship has been published widely in leading journals and proposes innovative legal and policy solutions for ensuring that all children receive equal access to an excellent education.

In 2019, New York University Press published her second edited book, “A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy,” which gathers leading constitutional and education law scholars to consider the challenging questions raised by recognizing a federal right to education in the United States. In 2015, Harvard Education Press published her book that was co-edited with Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School, titled “The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity.” Robinson’s article, “Disrupting Education Federalism” and published in the Washington University Law Review, won the 2016 Steven S. Goldberg Award for distinguished scholarship in education law from the Education Law Association. This article argues that the United States should reconstruct its understanding of education federalism to support a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education.

William J. Antholis serves as director and CEO of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history.

Immediately prior, he served as managing director at The Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014. In that capacity, he worked directly with Brookings' president and vice presidents to help manage the full range of policy studies, develop new initiatives, coordinate research across programs, strengthen the policy impact of Brookings’ research, and ensure the quality and independence of that research. On behalf of Brookings’ president, he also worked directly with Brookings’ board of trustees and a range of university, philanthropic, and other institutional partners. He was a resident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, where his work focused on the politics and institutions of international diplomacy.