Keynote Speakers

Gretchen Slease, USDOE
Gretchen Slease grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and graduated from Montgomery County Public Schools in 1988. She moved to Nashville, TN and attended Vanderbilt University, graduating with an English and Education degree. Gretchen taught 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in a private school in Nashville and in the Davidson County public schools. She earned her Master's Degree in Curriculum and Instructional Leadership from Peabody at Vanderbilt in 1998. Gretchen is currently taking a two year sabbatical from teaching to work for the Bush Administration at the US DOE on implementation of the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. She lives in Northeast DC.

Harvey Perkins, GWU
Harvey Perkins has spent 32 years in public education as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and assistant superintendent for instruction. He has led school-based and district wide reform in both suburban and urban school districts. For over 15 years he has taught educational administration courses at The George Washington University, specializing in the areas of curriculum development and leadership training. Dr. Perkins has been consulting and training in the area of school improvement both in the state of Virginia and nationally for 20 years. He is a certified curriculum auditor through Phi Delta Kappa’s Curriculum Audit Center, a certified trainer in the Southern Region Education Board’s (SREB) Leadership Initiative modules on “Creating a High Performance Learning Culture” and “Using Data to Lead Change”, and a certified assessor and mentor/coach trainer by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in its “Developing the 21st Century Principal” program. His primary focus for training centers on increasing the capacity of school leaders to build distributed leadership networks in their buildings and in their districts to increase student achievement in the era of high stakes testing and No Child Left Behind.