I have been a teacher, school founder, district leader, professor, business executive, and small business owner. Throughout, two things have been consistent: the responsibility for leading complex, high-stakes change projects, and a commitment to positive impact that requires challenging the status quo.

Cofounder and Entrepreneur

In 2020 I cofounded Outside Angle, and Outside Angle Labs. Outside Angle is a consulting services company focused on change leadership and organizational performance. We’ve helped more than 30 clients, from Fortune 500 companies to small nonprofits sharpen and their vision for change, create or shed systems and processes to bolster team performance, and build the internal trust and relationships necessary to do hard things well. Meet my awesome cofounder Sarah Silverman.

Startup Executive

As an executive at AltSchool, I led a bi-coastal network of innovative micro schools, and helped a high-profile technology start-up through a major restructuring. I managed school closures, mergers, and transitions while raising academic achievement and stakeholder satisfaction.

Professor

As a professor in the management program at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College I designed a course that now serves a template for exploration of the societal consequences of technological change, and taught four other classes about leadership, ed policy and the future of learning. Read more.

School District Leader

As a 29-year old district executive I led one of the highest profile transformations of human capital systems in a public school district – an $80M partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that included designing and operationalizing one of the nation’s first combined measures of teacher performance across more than 60 city schools. Read more.

School Founder

As a graduate student, I led a Carnegie Mellon team that designed a high school that would enable all students to succeed in advanced coursework prior to graduation, regardless of prior academic success. Two years later I opened this school as the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy. Read more.

Teacher

As a sixth-grade teacher at Elmhurst Middle School in east Oakland, CA I taught math and science, served an extraordinary group of learners, and learned lifelong lessons about leadership, equity and justice.

Skills and expertise

While my experience has been in the education sector, my skills transfer across sectors and are more about the process of leading teams, engaging communities, and managing change. My own academic background is in management, policy, and political science. In education, areas of especially deep content expertise include human capital systems and school design.