ASI Staff
Eugenia Kemble
Executive Director
Eugenia Kemble is Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a non-profit organization endowed by the American Federation of Teachers and dedicated to publishing reports and fostering candid exchange on education, labor, and democracy issues. Its newly launched Shankerblog has become central to these efforts.The Institute was launched in 1998, with the support of the AFT’s late President, Sandra Feldman, as a result of Kemble’s staff work. Beginning as a reporter for the newspaper of the United Federation of Teachers, the AFT’s New York City local, Kemble moved to the American Federation of Teachers as special assistant to Albert Shanker when he was first elected as AFT president in 1974. While in this position she obtained funding to create the union’s main professional development effort for teachers, the Education Research and Dissemination Program (ER&D) and to start the AFT’s professional magazine, The American Educator, both of which she managed for a number of years. She also revamped the AFT’s annual Quality Educational Standards in Teaching (QuEST) conference and helped Mr. Shanker spearhead the creation of the union’s Educational Issues, Research and International Affairs Departments. In 1983, Kemble was named as the AFL-CIO’s representative to the Democracy Program, a coalition effort including the Republican Party, Democratic Party, U.S. Chambers of Commerce, and AFL-CIO, that recommended the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit, Congressionally-funded organization that supports the development of unions, chambers of commerce, political parties and civil society organizations around the world, especially in countries where there are significant efforts to create or preserve struggling political democracies. In 1984 Ms. Kemble was named the Executive Director of the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which supported union efforts involved in democracy-building, most notably Solidarity in Poland. Returning to the AFT in 1989, she directed and helped to expand the AFT’s Educational Issues Department and it soon became one of the largest, most influential departments in the union.
Burnie Bond
Director of Programs
Edith Burnett (Burnie) Bond is director of programs at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute, where she works on a range of projects related to the institute’s key issue areas of educational excellence and equity, unions as advocates for quality, and the support of democracy and democratic institutions, both at home and abroad. Previously, she served as assistant director of the American Federation of Teachers’ Educational Issues Department. In that capacity, she monitored educational research on programs and teaching strategies to raise student achievement—especially for “at-risk” students in low-performing schools. She also worked on several related issues, including improving beginning reading instruction, research on and implementation of school turnaround strategies, standards-based reform, Title I, multicultural education, and efforts to improve the reliability and utility of educational research. She is a former staff assistant in the Office of AFT President Albert Shanker, where she served as coordinator of the AFT’s Education for Democracy Project, a program to promote a rigorous history and civics curriculum, and was formerly the director of research and publications for the International Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO, where she worked on international trade and labor rights issues. She also served on the 1992 Clinton Transition Team at the United States Information Agency.
Randall Garton
Director of Research and Operations
Randall Garton is Director of Research and Operations for the Albert Shanker Institute. Prior to coming to the Institute in 2001, he was Deputy for Program Operations at the Solidarity Center, the international program arm of the AFL-CIO, where he was responsible for operational aspects of programs on nearly every continent. During the course of a 24-year career at the AFL-CIO, Mr. Garton also directly monitored, administered and implemented programs in East and Southeast Asia and south central and south eastern Europe, and participated in regional and global conferences of the International Labor Organization and global union federations. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and holds a B.A. from Michigan State University, a J.D. from the Catholic University of America, and is a member of the District of Columbia Bar.
Matthew Di Carlo
Senior Fellow
Matthew Di Carlo is a senior research fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C. His current research focuses mostly on education policy, including value-added, charter schools, and teacher compensation. He has also published work on labor markets, social stratification/inequality, work and occupations, and political attitudes/behavior. Matt has a B.A. from Fordham University (1998), and a Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University (2008).
Esther Quintero
Research Associate
Esther Quintero is a research associate at the Albert Shanker Institute. Her work at the Institute focuses on higher education, early childhood, education technology, and teacher evaluation/compensation. Esther’s areas of work/interest also include: gender, social inequality, discrimination in employment, occupational segregation, group processes, cognitive/social biases, and intelligence/security. Esther has a B.A. in History from the University of Seville (1997), and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University in 2008.