>> I graduated from Pomona with clear sense that I wanted to do something that felt
like I was part of kind of solving big challenges, be part of the good fight,
get a job somehow doing good properly defined and so I moved to Washington D.C. cause
that seemed like the place where you do that and I started working and I've worked in a nonprofit
and public sector my entire career.
I started working at a nonprofit that was focused on supporting federal agencies
and being more effective in terms of their people management practices and both
for my professional experience and my interests, I determined that, you know,
I felt like organizationally working kind of within the machine to try to make it better
with something I wanted to try doing and so I decided to go to business school
and get a degree in business administration to learn more about all the nuts and bolts that go
into organizational management, get more quantitative grounding I say politics undergrad;
my focus within politics was political philosophy or political theory,
so not quantitative at all, so landed at the Department of Education four years ago.
I started in the department's office of teacher effectiveness which at
that time was just starting to pilot a new system of evaluation for teachers in accordance
with a newly vast state law at the time, so we were running a twenty school pilot, again,
we had 1700 schools in New York City, so worked in that office on several policy areas related
to teacher evaluation and effectiveness, focused a lot in communications and technology related
to that, see I'm not an educator so what makes a good teacher is not really my call,
but the tools that they may need and the information that they may need
and how to get to them is in my domain.
>> Absolutely.
>> From that role, I had the opportunity, so my role in office
of teacher effectiveness then was also kind of a connective tissue role so we had a lot of work
with other offices in the department around assessments and policy and legal and so I worked
across a lot of different offices and had a fairly strong network within the department
and after I had been in that office
for about two-and-a-half years there was a new chief operating officer appointed
and I interacted with him and he needed a chief of staff and we went through some procedures
and I wound up taking that role so I spent a year as the chief of staff
to the chief operating officer which was one
of the most interesting professional experiences in my life.
It is really how I got to sit at the top of a department that has a 130,000 employees,
it serves 1.1 million kids across 1700 schools; when it goes into operating that is just massive
and the only reason I'm not still in that role is we had a mayoral election,
so the top leadership at the department changed, my old boss is now actually in Washington,
so and I knew that that was coming, I knew the election was coming and I think I was, you know,
felt the experience would be worthwhile, I still feel the experience was worthwhile,
but during that time I was thinking about what my next step would be an I had worked
around technology in my teacher effectiveness role,
a chief information officer who's now my boss had reported to the chief operating officer
so I was working closely with him in a strategic capacity and so I identified a need for the kind
of work that I'm doing now in the technology division, I pitched the CIO on the idea
of hiring on to is his team and having me do this work and that worked out,
so that was in February of this year and I've been building my team in getting
that work off the ground ever since.