- I work as an education director at New America, where I lead and support a team working to improve the policy and practice of public schools in our country. Before I took this position in 2016, I spent a year in an RV with my family, living and learning as we explored the U.S. and bits of Canada and Mexico. Prior to our big trip, I was a senior associate at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where I researched and wrote about education policy issues and traveled often from the DC office to the Stanford-based mothership, where there were 50 or so amazing people researching and writing about how to improve teaching and learning. Before Carnegie, I was a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a DC-based nonprofit policy group, where I wrote about a wide range of educational issues, including public school staffing, scheduling, assessment, and the role of teachers’ unions in reform. I learned a lot about policy and what it can and can’t do, and met some pretty amazing people.
- Earlier, I was the director of research for the American Association of University Women, where I was privileged to lead some major national research initiatives and to write related research reports on gender equity in science and technology, higher education, and the workplace. I also managed the Foundation’s research grants portfolio, which meant I got to give out research grants and not just seek them.
- Before that, I was in California for graduate school at UC-Berkeley, where I got my master’s in multicultural education and then my Ph.D. in education policy and social and cultural studies. There, I met some brilliant lifelong friends. I also worked for local schools and youth development organizations and taught high school and undergraduate courses. I had moved to California from New Mexico, where I was mostly happily unemployed but also worked part-time for a social services agency while my then-friend and now-husband taught high school. I loved New Mexico–it was a slow and peaceful time and place– and I hope to go back someday.
- Before my westward travels, I was living back in my home city of DC, having landed a job after college with the ASPIRA Association, a national Latino education organization. I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but I was somehow allowed to write a federal grant for one of the first AmeriCorps service programs in the country. We got the money, and I got to run the program, which was wonderfully challenging and also humbling (I didn’t know what I was doing). After a few years, heading west to New Mexico, and then California, seemed like the right thing to do–to learn more, live a lot, and maybe find a new place to call home.
- Of course, in the end, I came back to DC. I live in Silver Spring now (still on the same Metro Red Line, just a few miles from where I grew up) with my husband, who’s a high school English and Journalism teacher. Together, we have two wonderful kids and a crazy hairy dog and a beautiful life.