Akilah Alleyne
Center for American Progress

John B. Diamond
Brown University

Michelle Molitor
The Equity Lab

Alia Wong
USA Today

John B. Diamond is Professor of Sociology and Education Policy in Brown University's Department of Sociology and Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Before coming to Brown, he was the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Education at Wisconsin–Madison. A sociologist of race and education, he studies the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, examining how educational leadership, policies, and practices operate through school organizations to shape students' educational opportunities and outcomes.

Despite the Best Intentions: How Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, his award-winning book with Amanda Lewis examines how racial inequality thrives in racially diverse suburban schools. The book won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities. In addition to completing a second edition of Despite the Best Intentions, Diamond is writing a new book, Defending the Color Line (Harvard Education Press).

In earlier work, Diamond helped develop the distributed perspective on school leadership and management and published Distributed Leadership in Practice (co-edited with James Spillane). He continues to work on leadership, organizations, and organizational change issues. With colleagues from UW-Madison and other institutions, he was recently awarded a major grant from the Wallace Foundation to study the development and implementation of equity-centered principal pipelines in several school districts across the United States.   

Diamond has helped create space for engaged scholarship in sociology and education. He is an advisory board member of the American Sociological Association's Sociology Action Network, has helped build research-practice partnerships between universities and school districts, and is a National Planning Team Member of the Urban Research Action Network (URBAN). With URBAN colleagues, he co-edited a special issue of Urban Education on community-engaged scholarship. Numerous media outlets have highlighted his work, including CNN, New York Times, Boston Globe, C-SPAN, Education Week, Bloomberg Business News, Crain's Chicago Business, and several public radio and television stations.

Diamond received his B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. He currently co-edits Sociology of Education (with Odis Johnson Jr.).

Akilah Alleyne is the Director and team lead for K-12 Education Policy at the Center for American Progress. She serves on the board of directors for the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware. Prior to joining the Center for American Progress, she served as a NextGen Fellow for the USGLC Global Leadership Coalition while working on the Hill for Senator Tom Carper (D-DE). Her research and policy work on civil rights and civic engagement spans a wide range of policy ideas, including using storytelling to examine the intersections between K-12 assessment and accountability systems and policymaking at all levels of government (local, state, and federal). Alleyne is committed to expanding access to opportunity, resources, and funding through an equity lens to improve the lives of children, young adults, and families across the United States. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Delaware.

Felice J. Levine is executive director of the American Educational Research Association, where she champions the advancement of knowledge; the use of sound research in policy and practice; and systematic change that promotes equity and inclusion. Her areas of expertise include science policy, research ethics, data access and sharing, and the scientific and academic workforce. Her current projects include an initiative to foster rethinking on what counts as quality, productivity, and impact in scientific and scholarly work; a systematic review of the cumulative significance of systemic racism for students; and a study of the impact of COVID-19 on doctoral students and early-career researchers. Levine chairs the Board of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, chairs the Social, Economic, and Political Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and co-chairs the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM. Levine is a recent past president of the World Education Research Association.