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May 23, 2012

Daniel Jhin Yoo, Founder, Goalbook

danieljyoo_photo.pngSpecial education is a central component of the U.S. public education system: some 12 percent of U.S. public school students are identified with disabilities, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, designed to protect the rights and improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities, probably impacts day-to-day school operation more than any other federal policy. Yet students with disabilities are often overlooked or marginalized in contemporary education reform conversations.

Daniel Yoo's company, Goalbook, is a rare entrepreneurial education venture that puts students with disabilities, and their parents and educators, front and center. Goalbook is a web-based productivity and compliance platform for special educators and administrators, but also has potential to support more customized learning for a broader range of students. It was incubated by Kauffman Education Ventures and Imagine K-12 and has received seed funding from the NewSchools Venture Fund.

A native of California, Yoo earned a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California and worked for Oracle and Google before leaving the technology industry to become a special education teacher in East Palo Alto. In 2011 he left teaching to found Goalbook. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 8:48 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 22, 2012

Reid Saaris, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Opportunity Schools

reid_saaris.jpgEven as our public policies seek to ensure that all students graduate high school ready to succeed in college and careers, the practices and beliefs in our public school systems too often mean that many students--particularly but hardly exclusively low-income and minority students--never have access to the types of rigorous coursework that prepare them for success. Reid Saaris and the organization he founded, Equal Opportunity Schools, are working to change that. Equal Opportunity Schools works with high schools and districts to increase the number of these students enrolled in advanced courses, with the goal of closing racial and income enrollment gaps in AP and IB courses by 2020.

A native and current resident of Washington State, Saaris earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and taught IB courses and coached at a public high school before founding Equal Opportunity Schools. He also hold's a master's degree and MBA from Stanford.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:56 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 21, 2012

Teddy Rice, President and Co-Founder, Ellevation

teddy-rice.jpgOne in ten U.S. public school students is an English language learner. In the past two decades, the population of ELL students has both grown rapidly and expanded beyond traditional "border" states to communities in all parts of the country. Yet our education system does a poor job of serving ELL students; there are large student achievement gaps between ELL students and their peers, and only 25-30 percent of ELL students graduate within four years of entering high school. Teddy Rice is working to change that. In 2011, Rice and Jordan Meranus of New Schools Venture Fund co-founded Ellevation, a mission-driven software company that focuses on tools to improve education for English language learner (ELL) students (disclosure: Some of my Bellwether colleagues have advised Ellevation).

A graduate of The Wharton School and Dartmouth College, Rice, 34, worked in consulting, education publishing and venture capital before founding Ellevation. He currently lives in Boston with his wife and two young children.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 8:43 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 18, 2012

Terence Patterson, Education Program Officer, Hyde Foundation

Terence Patterson 2.jpgMemphis native Terence Patterson returned in his hometown in 2011 to join the Hyde Family Foundations, which focuses on improving education, strengthening neighborhoods, and building community assets in Memphis. As education program officer, Patterson leads the Foundations' work to improve education for students in Memphis, at a time when the city, and Tennessee as a whole, are seizing new opportunities brought about by Race to the Top, yet also struggling with complex challenges. Patterson, 34, brings to this work his diverse experiences in both education reform and the private sector. Prior to returning to Memphis, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff to the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and Interim Officer for the Office of New Schools. He has also worked as a corporate financial analyst, entrepreneur and corporate transactional lawyer. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was a two-time Ivy League Football Player, and Northwestern University's dual MBA-JD program.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 8:15 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 17, 2012

Sophia Pappas, Executive Director, Office of Early Childhood Education, New York City Department of Education

Sophia Photo.JPGRegular readers of this blog are familiar with both the challenges and opportunities of early childhood education. Even as research demonstrates the incredible learning potential of young children and the impact of high-quality early learning programs to improve young children's learning outcomes, efforts to improve early learning outcomes continue to be constrained by limited--and in some cases, declining--funding, a fragmented early childhood system, a workforce with mixed skill levels, and even a lack of consensus in the field about the purposes of early childhood education. Sophia Pappas works at the heart of these challenges. As Executive Director of the Office of Early Childhood Education for the New York City Department of Education, Pappas oversees pre-k programs responsible for serving more than 58,000 4-year-olds in the City of New York, and also works to align pre-k offerings with the early elementary grades.

Pappas began her career as a Teach For America Corps Member placed in a Newark public school pre-k program, and wrote about her experience in the book Good Morning, Children. After leaving Newark Public Schools, she directed national growth and development for Teach For America's Early Childhood Education initiative, increasing the number of corps members placed in pre-k and Head Start classrooms by 83 percent and integrating early childhood into Teach For America's regional and national operations. A Long Island native, Pappas earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and a masters degree in public policy degree from Harvard. She lives in New York City.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:08 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 16, 2012

Ama Nyamekye, Executive Director, Educators for Excellence Los Angeles

bio_nyamekye (1).jpgLast year, this series profiled Educators for Excellence founders Evan Stone and Sydney Morris, who launched Educators for Excellence in New York City and state to engage teachers in education policy issues and provide a platform for teacher voices to be heard by policymakers and the media--with the ultimate goal of elevating the profession and ensuring that teacher expertise informs smart education policy choices.

Late last year Educators for Excellence expanded to Los Angeles, under the leadership of Ama Nyamekye. In its first several months in operation, E4E Los Angeles has built a membership base of more than 450 teachers and helped to author an amicus brief urging California courts to protect schools from seniority-based layoffs. Prior to joining E4E, Nyamekye, 31, began her career at an education nonprofit serving incarcerated young men and women and taught English in the New York City Public Schools through the New York City Teaching Fellows program. She has also worked for a global communications firm and consulted with a variety of education reform organizations. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Papua New Guinea, North Carolina, California, and Nevada, Nyamekye holds a bachelor's in Fine Arts from Emerson University and master's degrees from Pace and Columbia Universities. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is expecting a baby girl this summer.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 10:37 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 15, 2012

Ben Miller, Policy Advisor, Office for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education

ben miller.jpgConcerns about the equity, quality and outcomes of K-12 education have long been a feature of education policy debates, but analysts and policymakers have recently come to realize that our higher education system also suffers from poor outcomes (fewer than 60 percent of new students graduate college within 6 years), huge disparities in quality across institutions, and rapidly increasing college costs. As a result, our international lead in higher education attainment, which powered economic growth in the later half of the 20th century, has disappeared. And if the United States is to meet President Obama's goal of once again being first in the world in college completion, something's got to change.

As a Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Education, Ben Miller helps shape the administration's efforts to improve college quality and access, and also advises on elementary and secondary education issues. I first met Miller when he was a recent college graduate working at the New America Foundation, and have been excited to see the progress of his career since then. A Baltimore native and graduate of Brown University, Miller, 27, lives in Washington, D.C. with his girlfriend. In his limited free time, he enjoys cooking, grilling, reading and eating Maryland Blue Crab.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:54 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 14, 2012

Ben Marcovitz, Founder and Principal, Sci Academy, and CEO, Collegiate Academies

Ben_Marcovitz.jpgIn the six years since Hurricane Katrina, efforts to rebuild New Orleans' public schools have made the city an incredibly fertile ground for new education organizations and talent. Ben Marcovitz is one of the visionary young education leaders to emerge from post-Katrina New Orleans. In 2007 he founded Sci Academy, an open enrollment, college preparatory high school that has led the district in high school performance since its founding. That success in turn prompted the creation of the Collegiate Academies network, to replicate the Sci Academy model and grow the number of high-performing high schools in New Orleans that prepare all students to succeed in college. This fall, Collegiate Academies will open two additional schools in the historic George Washington Carver campus in New Orleans.

A graduate of Yale and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Marcovitz has taught in New Orleans, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Raised in Takoma Park, Maryland, he loves his adopted home city of New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and infant daughter.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:11 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 11, 2012

Toni Maraviglia, Founder, MPrep

Toni.Maraviglia.jpgInternational comparisons are all the rage in education these days, but they tend to focus on how American kids stack up (or don't) against their peers in other developed countries. It can be easy to forget that millions of students in the developing world lack access to educational opportunities altogether--or face extreme challenges in accessing them. Toni Maraviglia is tackling this challenge. Her company, MPrep, uses a common technology--cell phones--to improve learning for Kenyan primary school students. But that's just a first step in a broader vision to use accessible technologies to improve learning for students in developing countries throughout the world.

Maraviglia first began working in Kenya in 2008, when she founded WISERBridge, an education program that works to improve achievement in rural primary schools to enable all kids to access post-primary education. After launching WISERBridge, she taught at Harlem Village Academies in New York City before returning to Kenya in 2011 to found MPrep. A UCLA grad, Maraviglia began her career in education as a Teach for America corps member in West Harlem. Raised in Chicago and California, she currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya, and enjoys traveling in Kenya and Africa.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:23 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 10, 2012

Thaly Germain, Director, Lynch Leadership Academy

Glasses.jpgThaly Germain is Director of the Lynch Leadership Academy, a partnership between Boston College and the Lynch Foundation to strengthen leadership among principals working in parochial, district, and charter schools in Boston and build their capacity to improve student achievement in the schools they serve. Born in Haiti, Germain, 33, immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s, following a military coup in her native country, and was educated in schools in both Haiti and Brooklyn, New York. She previously taught in a public high school New York City and a charter school in Washington, D.C., of which she later became principal, and has held a variety of positions with New Leaders for New Schools. An alumnus of Bryn Mar College and New Leaders' Aspriging Principals program, she is currently in the process of moving from Washington, D.C. to Boston.

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Posted by Sara Mead at 9:21 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

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The opinions expressed in Sara Mead's Policy Update are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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