Speaker biographies in order of appearance.
Elizabeth Bartholet (Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law) is the founding Faculty Director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program. She teaches family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption, and reproductive technology. Before joining the HLS Faculty, she was engaged in civil rights and public interest work, first with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later as founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a non-profit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. Bartholet is a graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School. Her publications include Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Beacon Press, 1999), and Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production (Beacon Press, 1999). Her work on Homeschooling includes Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection, 62 Ariz. L. Rev. 1 (2020), “Homeschooling,” from Exploring Norms and Family Laws Across the Globe, Ed. Melissa L. Breger (Rowman-Littlefield/Lexington Publishers, forthcoming Fall 2021), and many media interviews. For more information about Professor Bartholet and to view her publications, please visit her website.
Professor James Dwyer has been on the faculty at William & Mary School of Law since 2000. He teaches Family Law, Youth Law, Law & Social Justice, and Trusts & Estates. His early scholarship was devoted to children’s rights in connection with education; he authored two books about the state’s stance toward private schools, especially religious schools—in particular, whether the state ought to regulate and oversee such schools to a greater extent in order to prevent educational deprivation and psychological or physical abuse (Religious Schools v. Children’s Rights, Cornell University Press 1998), and whether and on what conditions the state may, or even must, financially support religious schools (Vouchers Within Reason: A Child-Centered Approach to Education Reform, Cornell University Press 2002). Professor Dwyer returns to the realm of education with his latest book, a co-authored work entitled Homeschooling: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2019). In the interim, Dwyer has focused his attention on preventing child maltreatment in the home, making a number of bold child-centered proposals that he pulled together in a book released this year, Liberal Child Welfare Policy and Its Destruction of Black Lives (Routledge 2018). Professor Dwyer was a Visiting Faculty member at Harvard Law School in Fall 2019.
Shawn Peters, an internationally-recognized expert on law and religious liberty issues, is the author of six books, including (with James Dwyer) Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His research has been featured on CNN, PBS, and Court TV, as well as in Time, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He holds a Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently teaches in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program there.
Dr. Barbara Knox is the Medical Director of the Alaska Child Abuse Response and Evaluation Services (Alaska CARES) at the Children’s Hospital at Providence in Anchorage Alaska and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Prior to being in Alaska, Dr. Knox was a Professor and Chief of the Division of Child Abuse Pediatrics, at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health as well as Medical Director of the University of Wisconsin Child Protection Program at the American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Dr. Knox completed her residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She then completed a fellowship in Child Abuse Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Dr. Knox is board certified in General Pediatrics and Child Abuse Pediatrics.
Dr. Knox is President of the Academy on Violence and Abuse. She is a member of the Ray E. Helfer Society of Child Abuse Physicians. Dr. Knox also consults for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit III specializing in Crimes Against Children based in Quantico, Virginia. Areas of research interest for Dr. Knox include child physical/psychological torture as a form of child abuse and sexual torture as a form of child abuse. Dr. Knox has published on many topics, including child torture as a form of child abuse, burns of abuse, abusive head trauma, medical neglect in childhood, and is currently an editor for the book The Investigation, Diagnosis, and Prosecution of Child Torture. As part of her practice she cares for children who have been or are suspected of being victims of physical abuse, sexual abuse, medical child abuse, and neglect.
Chelsea McCracken currently serves as Research Director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), where she has been a member of the volunteer-led staff since 2013. CRHE envisions a world where homeschooled children’s right to a comprehensive and empowering education and a safe and supportive home environment is affirmed and protected by laws, stakeholders, and society as a whole. Chelsea grew up in Maryland, where she attended high-quality public schools K-12. She studied French and math at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and went on to earn her Ph.D. in linguistics from Rice University in 2012. Her first book, a reference grammar of an indigenous language of New Caledonia, was published by De Gruyter in 2019. Chelsea became involved in the homeschool reform movement as a result of the abuse and educational neglect experienced by her homeschooled family members. Her two peer-reviewed articles on academic achievement in Alaska correspondence schools were published in 2020 in the journal Other Education, and she is primarily responsible for maintaining Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, a public online database of documented cases of child abuse and neglect in homeschool environments. She gave an invited talk on this topic for the University of Oregon’s Child Advocacy Project in 2018 and has spoken with The Oregonian and The New Republic about her work. In 2020, on behalf of CRHE, Chelsea developed and taught the first known college-level course intended to instruct home educators how to homeschool successfully. Chelsea previously worked as a tenure-track faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences department at Dixie State University in southern Utah, where she instructed undergraduates in research methods and guided them in designing their own educational programs and assembling portfolios of their work. Chelsea now lives in Maryland and works for a linguistics research firm in the private sector.
Emily Putnam-Hornstein is the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need and the Director of Policy Practice at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also maintains appointments as a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Southern California where she co-directs the Children’s Data Network and as a research specialist with the California Child Welfare Indicators Project at UC Berkeley.
Emily’s current research focuses on the application of epidemiological methods to improve the surveillance of non-fatal and fatal child abuse and neglect. Her analysis of large-scale, linked administrative data has provided insight into where scarce resources may be most effectively targeted and informs understanding of maltreated children within a broader, population-based context. Emily is the recipient of the Forsythe Award for Child Welfare Leadership from the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators and the Commissioner’s Award from the Children’s Bureau. Emily graduated from Yale University with a BA in Psychology, received her MSW from Columbia University, and earned her Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley.
Milton Gaither received his PhD in History of Education from Indiana University at Bloomington in 2000. He has written three books, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (Teachers College, 2000), Homeschool: An American History (2008, 2nd ed., 2017), and American Education: A History (6th ed., 2020). He also edited the Wiley Handbook of Home Education (2017). Gaither is a founding board member of the International Center for Home Education Research and currently serves as Secretary of the History of Education Society.
Robert Kunzman is the Armstrong Chair for Teacher Education at Indiana University and Managing Director of the International Center for Home Education Research. He has been studying homeschooling since 2004 and is the author of more than two dozen publications about the topic, including the book Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling.
Michael K. Barbour is Associate Professor of Instructional Design for the College of Education and Health Sciences at Touro University California. He has been involved with K-12 distance, online, and blended learning for over two decades as a researcher, evaluator, teacher, course designer, and administrator throughout the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and several other international jurisdictions.
Lindsey Powell is a homeschool graduate passionate about sharing her experience with home education and advocating for reform. She’s written about her experience in The Harvard Crimson and New Internationalist Magazine. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 with a B.A. in Political Science and currently works as a Patent Administrator for Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development.
Sarah Henderson (who has also worked under the name Sarah Morton) is technically a homeschool alum. She also works for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, as the Advocacy and Support Coordinator. Her parents were fundamentalist Christians, and over time they became more and more embedded into power and control ideology, the importance of isolating their children from worldly influence, and following the Bible in a literal way. This included producing as many children as possible, which made the home dynamic more difficult and chaotic, and by the time she was 14, with 7 younger siblings, no one was really being homeschooled at all. She did a lot of reading on her own, and attended high school from 17-20, eventually earning a BA and a Bachelor of Social Work. Her personal and professional experience in the realm of homeschooling has convinced her that reform is required to give children in deficient homeschooling situations a chance at an adequate education.
Victor Vieth is Chief Program Officer for Research and Education of Zero Abuse Project, a 501©(3) public charity committed to education, training, and survivor support in order to eradicate child sex abuse and remedy its resulting harms. He has trained thousands of child-protection professionals from all 50 states, two U.S. Territories, and 17 countries on numerous topics pertaining to child abuse investigations, prosecutions and prevention, and has been instrumental in implementing 22 state and international forensic interview training programs and dozens of undergraduate and graduate programs on child maltreatment.
Mr. Vieth graduated magna cum laude from WSU and earned his Juris Doctor from Hamline University School of Law. In 2017, Victor earned an MA in theology from Wartburg Seminary. Mr. Vieth has published countless articles related to the investigation, prosecution and prevention of child abuse and neglect. He is author of Unto the Third Generation, a bold initiative that outlines the necessary steps we must all take to eliminate child abuse in America in three generations, and On This Rock: A Call to Center the Christian Response to Child Abuse on the Life and Works of Jesus (Wiff & Stock 2018).
Pete Singer is the Executive Director of GRACE, which works with faith communities to better recognize, prevent, and respond to abuse. He has 30 years’ experience in trauma-related roles, including social worker, foster parent, therapist, consultant, and executive director. He works with families, teens, and children who have experienced trauma, including maltreatment and other forms of violence. He has consulted with organizations such as the Zero Abuse Project, Minnesota Alliance on Crime, and more. He has served on multiple workgroups, including Ramsey County Youth in Transition Work Group, Ramsey County Ending Racial Disparities Work Group, Cultural Providers Network, and Washington County Foster Care Recruitment Work Group. Pete completed his MSW at the University of Minnesota, where he also received a Certificate in Trauma-Effective Leadership. He speaks nationally on trauma, trauma-informed practice, and more, including the National Crime Victim’s Bar Association; Academy on Violence and Abuse; Institute on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma; and Harvard’s Faith and Flourishing conference. He has published and contributed to several articles and book chapters, including Responding to Child Abuse During a Pandemic; Wounded Souls: The Need for Child Protection Professionals and Faith Leaders to Recognize and Respond to the Spiritual Impact of Abuse; and Coordinating Pastoral Care of Survivors with Mental Health Providers.
The Reverend Darrell LaRue Armstrong is committed to the notion that strengthening families is a strategy for preventing child abuse and neglect. Having spent most of his childhood in foster and kinship care in South Central Los Angeles, he knows all too well the effects of family disruption and dysfunction. His professional and personal experiences illustrate his commitment to cross-sector engagement. In his 20th year of service to his congregation, he is only the third pastor of the historic Shiloh Baptist Church, (Trenton, NJ) in the last 115 years! His visionary leadership has propelled Shiloh to create a “Spiritual Family Empowerment Zone,” a large-scale neighborhood revitalization and community development effort which projects $50M in urban investments.
From 2006 to 2009, he served as the director of the Division of Prevention and Community Partnerships for the NJ Department of Children & Families, where he oversaw a budget of $100M-plus of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs. He is an entrepreneur, having founded the Institute for Clergy Training, a research and training agency, which partners with multi-sector agencies on a variety of topics related to leadership, child and social welfare. The Rev. Armstrong’s policy training at Stanford University, theological training at Princeton Theological Seminary, and therapeutic and clinical training at the College of New Jersey, have uniquely situated him as a respected voice and leader in the national and international child welfare and family strengthening communities.
Shira Berkovits is President and CEO of Sacred Spaces. A behavioral psychologist with a research background in creating large-scale organizational change, and an attorney specialized in criminal law, Shira has spent years studying the intersection of psychology and law as related to sexual offending in faith communities. Bringing a uniquely Jewish lens, Shira partners with Jewish leaders to build healthy and accountable institutions, whose culture and daily operations foster sacredness and reduce the risk of harassment, abuse, and other forms of interpersonal harm. In her role as CEO of Sacred Spaces, she has worked with Jewish communities across five continents to prevent, handle, and heal from institutional abuse. In addition to an Amazon bestseller, Shira has published pioneering pieces on abusive institutional practices, which have contributed to the end of solitary confinement for juveniles at Rikers Island and are regularly cited as foundational texts in the Jewish abuse prevention field. Selected as an inaugural Wexner Field Fellow and named to The Jewish Week’s 2017 36 Under 36 for her pioneering work on abuse prevention, Shira sits on the board of the Academy on Violence and Abuse and is a member of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation.
Dr. Rachel Coleman was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school in Indiana, where her parents were on the board of a regional homeschool association, the Southwestern Indiana Home Educators Association. She completed her M.A. thesis, “A Case Study of the Homeschool Community in Delaware County, Indiana,” at Ball State University in 2010, and was present at the founding of the International Center for Home Education Research. In 2013, she co-founded the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, where she served as executive director from 2014 to 2021. Dr. Coleman wrote her dissertation on changing evangelical ideas about children and education over the course of the twentieth century, including a substantial section on the emergence of homeschooling, and received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Indiana University in 2018. In 2020, Dr. Coleman published two peer-reviewed studies, “A Meaningful Measure of Homeschool Academic Achievement” and “Who ‘Counts’ as Homeschooled?” Dr. Coleman currently serves as the Advisor to the Executive Director at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Viola Vaughan-Eden, PhD, MSW, MJ is Associate Professor and PhD Program Director with the Ethelyn R. Strong School of Social Work at Norfolk State University in Southeastern Virginia. She is also the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at The UP Institute, a think tank for upstream child abuse solutions. As a forensic and licensed clinical social worker, she serves as a consultant and expert witness in child maltreatment cases – principally sexual abuse. Dr. Vaughan-Eden is President Emerita of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, President Emerita of the National Partnership to End Interpersonal Violence, and Past-President of the National Organization of Forensic Social Work. She lectures nationally and internationally on child and family welfare to multidisciplinary groups of professionals. Dr. Vaughan-Eden was an invited panelist on two Congressional Briefings – Spare the Rod, Protect the Child: A Reconsideration of Corporal Punishment of Children in Homes and Schools (November 2015) and Protecting Child Safety in Family Court (September 2016). She is the author of several child maltreatment articles and book chapters and was co-editor of the 2012 APSAC Practice Guidelines: Forensic Interviewing in Cases of Suspected Child Abuse. She is the recipient of several honors including the 2020 Sol Gothard Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2019 Council of Social Work Education Leadership Scholar, and the 2012 National Association of Social Workers-Virginia Chapter Lifetime Achievement Award. See www.violavaughaneden.com
Frank E. Vandervort, JD, is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School where he teaches in the Child Advocacy and Juvenile Justice Clinics. His research interests include child protection, juvenile justice and interdisciplinary practice. Most recently, he has focused on the impact of substance abuse during pregnancy and on the linkages between child maltreatment and subsequent violence by children. He is a co-author of the book “Seeking Justice in Child Sexual Abuse: Shifting Burdens and Sharing Responsibilities,” and has written numerous articles and book chapters relating to child protection and juvenile justice. Professor Vandervort is the Immediate Past President of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) and Chairs the organization’s Amicus & Public Policy Committee. He received a Pro Humanitate Award in 2017 from the North American Resource Center for Child Welfare and was given APSAC’s 2016 award for Outstanding Service.
Dr. Michael Scott is a senior policy analyst in the Center for Education Policy and Practice at the National Education Association. His policy areas focus on pro-public education and public school options, and he supports NEA’s priority of amplifying educator voice to build equitable opportunities for student success. He is also an adjunct lecturer in educational policy at American University. Michael earned a Ph.D. in educational leadership and policy from The University of Texas at Austin.
Carmen Longoria-Green grew up in Missouri, where she was homeschooled from first through twelfth grade. Growing up, Carmen learned first-hand the problems that students face in states with little homeschool oversight or student-focused protections, an experience that has made her passionate about improving the lives of all homeschooled students. Carmen was formerly the litigation counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, where she litigated religious-freedom cases at both the trial and appellate levels. Currently, Carmen is an associate in Mayer Brown’s Washington, DC office, where she is a member of the Litigation and Dispute Resolution practice. Carmen earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and her B.A. in Government from Patrick Henry College.
Samantha Field was homeschooled for ten years, and grew up in an authoritarian, fundamentalist church that belonged to the Quiverfull and Stay-at-Home-Daughter movements. She graduated from Pensacola Christian College with a BS in Secondary Education before attending Liberty University to pursue an MA in English; most recently she graduated from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities with an MA in Religious Leadership in 2019. In 2013, she began writing and speaking about her experiences and has been published at Relevant, Rewire, the Establishment, Sojourners, interviewed for the Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, and Cosmopolitan, spoken at conferences, and featured on a number of radio programs, including BBC4’s Things Unseen and Beyond Belief as well as NPR’s 1A program. She has been involved in various activism efforts, direct actions, and managed communications for various nonprofits and social media campaigns. Samantha lives in Maryland.
Professor Emily Zackin is a 2010 Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her dissertation won the Edward S. Corwin Award for Best Dissertation Public Law and the Walter Dean Burnham Best Dissertation Award from the Politics and History section of APSA. Dr. Zackin is the author of “Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights” Princeton University, 2013 which is based on her dissertation. Her book focuses on three political movements to add these kinds of positive rights to state constitutions. In particular, it examines the campaign for education rights, which spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the movement for positive labor rights, which occurred during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the push to add environmental bills of rights to state constitutions during the 1960s and 1970s.
John Affeldt is a managing attorney at Public Advocates in San Francisco, where he focuses on educational equity issues through litigation, policy advocacy and partnerships with grassroots organizations. John has served as a lead counsel on major ground-breaking lawsuits filed by Public Advocates including Williams v. California, which resulted in a breakthrough 2004 settlement guaranteeing California’s students sufficient instructional materials, decent facilities and qualified teachers.
John has worked on numerous school finance, teacher quality, equitable opportunity and accountability policies in Sacramento. As part of this work, in 2006 John co-drafted a state law that now requires all schools to report publicly their actual per-pupil expenditures by school site, the first such law in the country. In 2013 and 2014, John helped to shape several key provisions of California’s new school funding law known as the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). These new laws require schools to provide increased or improved services for high need students in proportion to the billions of dollars of additional funds generated by such students, establish parental involvement as a new state priority, and require new levels of community engagement and transparency in school planning and budgeting statewide.
John is a founding member of the Campaign for Quality Education, Parents and Students for Great Schools, and the LCFF Equity Coalition, which are grassroots, community-based and advocacy coalitions that have worked on statewide policy advocacy campaigns to improve educational opportunities for low-income students of color and to build power in low-income communities.
Michael A. Rebell is the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity and Professor of Practice in Law and Educational Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also an adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Chairman of the New York State Civic Readiness Task Force.
Mr. Rebell is also currently lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Cook v.Raimondo, a class action law suit that was recently filed in the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island to establish a right to an education adequate for capable citizenship for all students in the United States. Previously, Mr. Rebell was the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and co-counsel for the plaintiffs in CFE v. State of New York, a challenge to the system of funding public education in the State of New York which has established the right of all students in the state to the “opportunity for a sound basic education.” Mr. Rebell has also litigated numerous major class action lawsuits, including Jose P. v. Mills, which involved a plaintiff class of 160,000 students with disabilities. He also served as a court-appointed special master in the Boston special education case, Allen v. Parks.
Rebell is the author or co-author of six books, and dozens of articles on issues of law and education. Among his recent works are Flunking Democracy: Schools, Courts and Civic Participation (Univ of Chicago Press, 2018), Courts And Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity Through The State Courts (U. Chicago Press, 2009 and 2017 Supplement,) and The Right to Comprehensive Educational Opportunity, 47 Harvard Civil Rts-Civil Lib. L. Rev. 49 (2012). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.