 Her name is Vanessa Kiesler, who is now at the state. Vanessa came up to me and she said, you know, Barbara, there's this thing called the Michigan Merit Curriculum, and we really should be looking at its impact. And the idea for us to start looking at the impact of the Michigan Merit Curriculum was truly Vanessa's. And I said, OK, well, let's go to the state and talk to Tom and see, in fact, if we can get some state data and be able to do this. So we went to the state and said to Tom, Tom, we'd like to be able to do this. And Tom said, well, you're late. Brian Jacob at the University of Michigan has already asked us for that. And I thought to myself, hmm. Brian Jacob, I remember when he was a student and worked with me at the University of Chicago. He's so smart. No wonder he's here first. So anyway, I called Brian up. And Tom said, we're not going to give two letters. We're going to give one. And we haven't written that letter yet, so I suggest you work together. I said, OK, well, that sounds like a very good idea. It's time for the young to take over. And I called Brian and I said, you know, how about if we come together on this and look at the impact of the Michigan Merit Curriculum? And Brian was kind enough to say, oh, that's a great idea. Now, there's another side to this story as well. And I was going to wait till Mike came. But when Mike became the superintendent not too long after that, I had come to Michigan. And Mike had said to me, you know, you were involved with that Tony Breik thing at the University of Chicago. Don't you think maybe we could have a consortium here? And I said, well, you know, I could work on that. And I promised Mike I would work on that. And I've been working on that now for seven years. And I could say that having the University of Michigan and Michigan State and MDE and CEPI all come together to look at the impact of the Michigan Merit Curriculum with all of that wealth of data that's in our state has really begun to form that consortium. And it is really, I think, a tribute to everyone that's in this room that we can get past our differences, that we can come together as a group, that we can start to work on things that have real true significance to our children's lives. And I'm just so proud that we have been able to kind of, which was really, as they say, an arranged marriage come together without burning up. So we have managed to work out our differences. And this is the really great part about doing this work together. The people from the Michigan State side, we're sociologists and our colleagues at the University of Michigan are economists. So you just try and think about economists and sociologists, very different lenses on the world. But I think we've informed each other, we've learned a lot from each other, and the presentations today are really because of the work that we've been able to do together. Now, who are we all? And I would like to say, as I explained before, Brian Jacob, he's our leader in force, who is joined by Susan Denarski, who is also an economist at the U of N, and Ken Frank, who is a sociologist from Michigan State University. And there is Tom Howell, who is from CEPI. I don't see Joseph Martino from MDE, but I do see Vanessa Kiesler. And so pretty much those are the PIs for this very huge effort that the Institute for Education Sciences in the US Department of Education was very happy to see our proposal. First time out of the box, which is really an amazing situation for several million dollars over a five year period, which will probably end up being much longer than that, to look at the impact of the Michigan Merit Curriculum and also the scholarship program, which we know sunsetted, but we still are going to be doing some very interesting things with the Mission Promise Scholarship Program. So I think that one thing to remember is that when this particular proposal was sent to the Institute for Education Sciences and it was approved by the US Department of Education, that these kinds of proposals get the highest level of scrutiny that can possibly be looked at. And I think that in fairness to my colleagues, I would like to say that the reason we were funded really comes through the efforts of Brian and Sue and Ken and our effort was much smaller, that is at least mine, in terms of putting together a really winning proposal. Anyway, now what have we been up to? Well, what we've been up to for the past several years is bringing together teams of graduate students from both of our institutions to work together. And I will admit where we might have had our differences, the graduate students had less differences and they really have been really quite extraordinary. They've been working together taking all of these different data sets. And if you look in your gender books, it will describe to you all of the different data sets that have come together here. And we have really been all of us working very hard. Now you have to remember that all of these data sets are in the department in the state and to be able to get a data set, you have to go through a lot of different kinds of procedures. That is a very good thing. Because essentially what's happening is we're protecting the children of this state so that all of the kinds of confidentiality procedures and the kinds of procedures that say what are you going to do with our data are followed and they're followed to the rule. And we're happy about that because that means that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing. And I would say that for us researchers we're very happy about that. But that couldn't have happened and all of these amounts of data that we have could never have happened without our state partners. So what I would like to do is I'm going to call out a lot of people's names and I want to start and ask you if they would please stand because we're not talking about like hours of work. We're talking about years of work, days of work, hours of work and I'd like everybody to please stand. So first of all, I'd like to say as I had said before to Tom Howell, Vanessa Kiesler, Joseph Martino and then our data analysts at the state who have been really incredible answering our questions, working with us. And I know there are times when they say, oh no, not another email from those people. So Trina, I see you over there. Trina Anderson, Rod Bernoski, Melissa, you're over there. Hiding, you shouldn't be Laurie Campbell or in Christmas, Karen Conroy, Carol Jones and Mike McGrory. Could you all please stand so we can give them an applause, please. And then you have to say, well, with four very busy PIs, who's really running the show? And I'll tell you who's running the show and if I can remember to say, starting with his names correctly, that would be a real, because when I look at his name in my emails, I always say he melts instead of his names, which is Steve Hamels. And Steve is a postdoc who's been with us for two years, soon to be on the job market, so anybody in the room, we are very proud to have Steve. And this year he has been joined with Rachel Rosen and Beth Covey, also as postdocs. And let's just say that they're the people that really control the rest of us, which we all need controlling on. And then we have, of course, our graduate students and they're all here, so let me just see if I can pronounce any of their names correctly. Monica Batt, I thought I saw him. No, she, okay, Quentin Brummit, Paul Burkander, Hassan Anadi, Monica Hernandez, Joseph, Jonathan Hersheff, okay. Emily House, Joshua Hyman, Tamara Linkau, she's not here anymore. She's, it's not that she's not here anymore. She graduated and went on and took a job. That's what we try and do with all of our people. Kate Novernoff, Elizabeth Quinn, Gwansaw, Nathaniel Schwartz, and Chris Brozek. Up guys, up guys. Steve, you gotta get up too. Come on, let's go, Steve, Rachel, Beth, let's go. And then finally, you've got something in your hand. There's things on the wall. There are speakers that are going to talk and that just happens because there is Julie, Amantanero, DeCastro, and Christina Mazzucca. And they're the right, the left, the feet, the hands of certainly me and I know that's true for our team at the U of M as well. And I want to say to both of you, thank you so much because this conference is really yours. And Julie, I know that you've worked very hard on this and Christina and so you're our friends. So please stand up and let's get round to the applause. So what we're going to do, the way we're going, we have arranged this is that each of our PIs is going to give a presentation and then we will take questions after the presentation from the PIs from the floor. We will also have a panel later today. When we have our panel, we're going to be passing out some cards and we're going to take your questions to the panel on those cards. And then I'm going to kind of wrap things up at the end and we'll see in fact how that all goes. I hope that most of you will be able to stay for the day. The most important thing to remember about what we're trying to do here is that this is the beginning of our project. These are not the things that are going to happen all the way at the end, but it's certainly everything that we're presenting today is very real and these are things that have been done with the best methods that we have to bring to the table. You've got some of the best statistical expertise of the three people, my co-PI sitting at that table. And as I told you before, when I was asked to pick up the phone and call Brian, I knew that I was calling somebody that had a lot to bring to the table, certainly more than I did. And then I had the pleasure of meeting his co-investigator from the U of M, Susan Denarski. And this has been one of the two joys for me because here is a professor of public policy, education and economics at the University of Michigan who is spectacular. So let me just say that she holds a PhD in economics from MIT and an MS in public policy in NAB in social studies from Harvard. By the way, Brian has a social studies degree from Harvard as well. I don't know what it's about those social studies people at Harvard, they sure know how to put out great economists. Anyway, Sue is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. We all know that very fancy place. And she's been a visiting fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Princeton University. She's the editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and Education, Finance and Policy. Her research and some of you I think here in the audience are participating in her work on charter schools, demand for private schooling, historical trends in inequality and educational attainment, and optimal design of financial aid. Her previous research explored the impact of grants and loans on educational attainment and distributional consequences of tasks incentives for college savings. I wanna say that Sue, very similar to some of our other folks here has testified at the US Senate Finance Committee, the US House and Ways Means Committee and the President's Commission on Task Reform. And she's been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Institute of Aging. As you can imagine, this is a pretty star-studded team. So with that, I would like to welcome our first speaker, Sue Denarski. Sue, please.