Allan Odden is Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; he also is Co-Director of the Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC) in public education and Co-Director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). CPRE is a consortium of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, Teachers College-Columbia University, and Stanford Universities. He is an international expert on education finance, effective resource allocation and use, resource reallocation, the strategic management of human capital in education, teacher compensation, school-based management, and educational policy development and implementation. He consults regularly with states and districts on these issues.

His most recent books include School Finance: A Policy Perspective (McGraw Hill, 2008, 4th edition), with Lawrence O. Picus and How to Create World Class Teacher Compensation (Freeload Press, 2007) with Marc Wallace. Other books include Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do: New and Smarter Compensation Strategies to Improve Schools (Corwin Press, 1997, 2^nd Edition, 2002) with Carolyn Kelley; Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Spending More (Corwin, 2001) with Sarah Archibald; School Finance: A Policy Perspective (McGraw Hill, 1992, 2^nd Edition, 2000, 3^rd Edition 2004) co-authored with Lawrence Picus; School-Based Finance (Corwin Press, 1999), edited with Margaret Goertz; Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources (Jossey Bass, 1998) with Carolyn Busch; Educational Leadership for America’s Schools (McGraw Hill, 1995); Rethinking School Finance: An Agenda for the 1990s (Jossey-Bass, 1992); Education Policy Implementation (State University of New York Press, 1991); and School Finance and School Improvement: Linkages for the 1980s (Ballinger, 1983).

He was a mathematics teacher and curriculum developer in New York City’s East Harlem for five years. He received his PhD and MA degrees from Columbia University, a Masters of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary and his BS in aerospace engineering from Brown University.

Sarah Archibald is a school finance researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She has a PhD in educational leadership in policy analysis (ELPA) from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently holds an appointment as a lecturer in the ELPA department. Her career at the University of Wisconsin began as an undergraduate in political science; she received her BA in 1993. Next, she received a master's degree in policy analysis from the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs in 1998, and shortly thereafter became a researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at UW-Madison (CPRE). During the past ten years at CPRE, she has studied and assisted in district- and school-level reform, district- and school-level resource reallocation, educational adequacy, professional development, teacher compensation, and most recently, the strategic management of human capital. She helped develop two frameworks for collecting micro-level data, both published in the Journal of Education Finance: a school-level expenditure structure, and a framework for capturing professional development costs at the district and school level. She is the coauthor of the previous edition of Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Asking For More, and the author or coauthor of numerous articles on these subjects. Archibald's passion is participating in research that informs policy. Among other projects, she is now a researcher with IRIS (Integrated Resource Information System), a project funded by IES (Institute of Education Sciences). The goal of IRIS is to help Milwaukee Public Schools create a system for tracking resource data down to the school level so that district leaders can answer questions about what works and use district resources strategically to support higher levels of achievement for urban schoolchildren.