Chester E. Finn, Jr., scholar, educator and public servant, has devoted most of his career to improving education in the United States. As John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, his primary focus is the reform of primary and secondary schooling.Finn is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he worked from 1995 through 1998. From 1992 through 1994, he served as founding partner and senior scholar with the Edison Project. He has been Professor of Education and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University since 1981. (He is currently on leave.) From 1985 to 1988 he served as Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. Earlier positions include Staff Assistant to the President of the United States; Special Assistant to the Governor of Massachusetts; Counsel to the American Ambassador to India; Research Associate in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution; and Legislative Director for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.A native of Ohio, he holds an undergraduate degree in U.S. history, a master's degree in social studies teaching, and a doctorate in education policy and administration from Harvard University.

For more than 20 years, Finn has been in the forefront of the national debate about school reform. His participation in seminars, conferences, and hearings has taken him to colleges, education and civic groups,and government organizations throughout the United States, and to more than a dozen countries.Author of 13 books, Finn's most recent, released in March 2000 by Princeton University Press, is Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education, co-authored with Bruno V. Manno and Gregg Vanourek. In 1999, with William J. Bennett and John Cribb, he published The Educated Child: A Parent's Guide from Pre-School Through Eighth Grade (The Free Press). Other titles among his eleven books include The New Promise of American Life, co-edited with Lamar Alexander; Radical Education Reforms; Education Reform in the 90's; We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future; What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? written with Diane Ravitch, and Scholars, Dollars and Bureaucrats.

He serves on a number of boards including K12, Project Achieve, and The Philanthropy Roundtable, as well as the advisory boards of the National Association of Scholars, the Center of the American Experiment, and Parents Raising Educational Standards in Schools. From 1988 to 1996, he was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, including two years as its Chairman.

Author of more than 300 articles, his work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Business Review, The American Spectator, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

Finn has received citations and awards for his work from the Educational Press Association of America,Choice magazine, the Education Writers Association, and the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. He holds an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colgate University.He and his wife, Renu Virmani, a physician, have two grown children. They live in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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