Born on July 24, 1944, in Waterbury, Connecticut, Chester E. Finn Jr. is a leading education policy scholar and a prominent figure in American education reform, advocating for standards-based accountability, school choice, charter schools, and voucher programs from a conservative perspective. He earned an A.B. cum laude in government from Harvard College in 1965, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he received a B.Phil. in politics in 1967, and obtained a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1971. Early in his career, Finn worked as a management consultant, taught political science at Harvard and Vanderbilt universities, and served as special assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) from 1977 to 1981. He held several influential government roles, including special assistant in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education (1985-1988) under Secretary William J. Bennett during the Reagan administration. In 1997, he co-founded the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (originally the Fordham Foundation), leading it as president until 2014 and remaining president emeritus thereafter. He has also been a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a fellow at the International Affairs Center of the Hudson Institute. Author or co-author of over a dozen books on education policy, including the memoir 'Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik' (2008) and 'Exam Schools from the Inside Out' (2019), Finn continues to shape debates on K-12 education through writings, speeches, and affiliations with conservative think tanks. He is married to Rebecca Buckley Finn, with whom he has three children, and lives in the Washington, D.C., area.