Robert Balfanz is a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University and associate director of the Talent Development Middle and High School Project, which is currently working with more than fifty high-poverty secondary schools to develop, implement, and evaluate comprehensive whole-school reforms. His work focuses on translating research findings into effective reforms for high-poverty secondary schools.

Duncan D. Chaplin is a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research and a consultant for the Urban Institute. As a specialist in labor economics and econometrics, he focuses on improving the methods used to estimate impacts of various education policies on academic and non-academic outcomes of students including high school and college graduation rates.

Jay Greene is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Endowed Chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Nettie Legters, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, and Co-Director of the Center's Talent Development High Schools (TDHS) program. Her research focuses on equity in education, school organization, teachers' work, dropout prevention, and implementation, scale-up, and impact of secondary education reform.

Daniel Losen is a Staff Attorney at the Civil Rights Project.

Christopher Swanson is the director of the EPE Research Center, a division of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week. In this capacity, he oversees a staff of full-time researchers and interns who conduct annual policy surveys, collect data, and perform analyses that appear in the Quality Counts, Technology Counts, and Diplomas Count annual reports of Education Week.