School reopenings: Technology and the widening gap

Bart Epstein is president and CEO of the nonprofit the EdTech Evidence Exchange, and a research associate professor at the University of Virginia Curry School of Education. In these roles, Bart helps to lead a national movement to support educators and institutional leaders to make better informed decisions about the educational technologies they select and implement.

Prior to launching the EdTech Evidence Exchange-- originally known as the Jefferson Education Exchange—Epstein served as founding CEO of the Jefferson Education Accelerator, which focuses on helping growth-stage education companies perform real academic research to demonstrate impact on student learning outcomes. He previously spent ten years helping to build the world’s largest online tutoring and homework help service, Tutor.com. Along the way he served as Chief Strategy Officer, General Counsel, and General Manager of the U.S. Department of Defense Online Tutoring and Homework Help Service for Military Families.

Kimberly Jenkins Robinson 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.

Robert C. Pianta is Dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. He also holds positions as the Novartis Professor of Education, Founding Director of the Curry School’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), Professor of Psychology at the UVa College of Arts & Sciences, and Director of the National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education.

Pianta’s research and policy interests focus on teacher-student interactions and relationships and on the improvement of teachers’ contributions to students’ learning and development. He is the author of more than 250 articles, 50 book chapters, and 10 books, and has been a principal investigator on research and training grants totaling over $55 million. He served as the editor of the Journal of School Psychology from 1999 to 2007.

Among other research measures and instruments, Pianta is the creator of an observational assessment of teacher-student interactions known as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ or CLASS, with versions for use with infants through twelfth grade students, all of which have been shown to capture features of teacher-student interactions that contribute to learning and development. CLASS is used by every Head Start program in the country, affecting 50,000 teachers and over half a million students.

Pianta has also developed a series of proven-effective professional development supports engineered to improve teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom. Called MyTeachingPartner™ or MTP, these supports include a web-mediated approach to individualized coaching on teacher-student interactions, a video library of effective interactions, and a college course.