Deb Ausman
Deb Ausman has been a member of AFT Local 2398, Chippewa Valley Technical College Staff and Clerical Federation, for more than 27 years. She has held a variety of positions in her local over the years, including president, vice president, negotiations chair, and delegate to state and national labor conventions. Currently, she serves as treasurer, constitution committee chair and negotiations spokesperson of Local 2398, as well as secretary of the AFT-Wisconsin executive board. Ausman is a member of the AFT Paraprofessionals and School-Related Personnel program and policy council. A graduate of Chippewa Valley Technical College, she began her work career at the college as an instructional assistant in 1980. She has worked as an adjunct instructor and internal operations clerk, and, since 1992, has been the college’s payroll technician. She is active in legislative issues and is involved with the Citizen Alliance for Strong Communities.

Stefan Cohen
Stefan Cohen is a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards-certified teacher in the Rochester (N.Y.) City School District. He is starting his 20th year in the classroom and currently teaches U.S. history and government, and Advanced Placement U.S. history, at Rochester’s School of the Arts, where he has been the team leader of the social studies department. In addition to teaching students, he begins work this fall as a lead teacher, helping create professional development as part of Rochester’s federal Teaching American History grant. He has presented his workshop, “Why Every High School Student Should Read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” at local and state social studies council conferences. Cohen is an active building representative with the Rochester Teachers Association and serves on the Career in Teaching governing panel, which oversees Rochester’s nationally recognized mentor/intern program for teachers. He also serves on the RTA’s sabbatical committee, assists National Board candidates as a certified candidate support provider, and has helped train other building representatives.

Mary Doyle
Mary Doyle is the senior director of school innovation for the Rochester (N.Y.) City School District, which serves approximately 34,000 students in 60 schools. She oversees a portfolio of high-quality schools, using the strategies of new school creation, school redesign and school phase out. She was formerly the district strategic planner for the Providence Public School District. Before that, she was a senior associate for the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, where she led a learning community of teachers and staff across 20 pilot schools serving more than 7,000 students in the Boston Public Schools. She also has been a high school teacher in the Boston Public Schools and a researcher at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Doyle holds a master’s degree in education policy and management from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree in history from Tufts University.

Catalina Fortino
Catalina Fortino is currently the program coordinator for the United Federation of Teachers’ Teacher Center in New York City, where she previously served as a mentor liaison, a tier 1 coach for Reading First and a field liaison. She also has worked for the New York City Board of Education as an instructional specialist, site coordinator and classroom teacher. Fortino holds a master’s degree from Queens College.

Janice Jackson
Janice Jackson is a lecturer in educational leadership and organizations at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the senior associate on the Wallace-funded Executive Leadership Program for Educators. This initiative is a multiyear collaborative effort of the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government to work with district and state superintendents and their teams to help bring high-quality teaching and learning to scale. Jackson is also a faculty member in the Leadership for Change Program in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Prior to her current position, she was an assistant professor at Boston College’s school of education, where she had a joint appointment in the Department of Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum & Instruction and the Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education. She previously served as the deputy superintendent for the Boston Public Schools and, during the first term of the Clinton administration, served as deputy assistant secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education for the U.S. Department of Education. Jackson has held several positions with the Milwaukee Public Schools in Wisconsin. She also has been a consultant on issues related to the reform of urban schools. Her research interests include bridging the gap between research and practice, as well as leadership and organizational change in public school districts.

Julia E. Koppich
Julia E. Koppich is a San Francisco-based education consultant and president of J. Koppich & Associates. She has taught at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education and at the Stanford University School of Education. Koppich holds a doctorate in educational administration and policy analysis from UC Berkeley and has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Education, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, the National Governors Association, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Alliance of Business, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the National Science Foundation.

Koppich served as principal investigator for a four-year study of the impact of National Board-certified teachers in low-performing schools. She currently serves as part of the national team of researchers providing technical assistance to recipients of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants, and is a senior researcher on a national project, Strategic Management of Human Capital.

Her areas of specialization include education policy analysis and public sector labor relations. She is the author of numerous articles and co-author of two books: A Union of Professionals and United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society.

Joan Kuchcinski
Joan Kuchcinski is a retired classroom teacher who currently works with Toledo (Ohio) Public Schools and the Toledo Federation of Teachers as the coordinator of the Toledo Review and Alternative Compensation System (TRACS) and the Teacher Incentive Fund grant. TRACS was implemented in the 2002-03 school year and is a differentiated compensation system that promotes teacher quality while improving the academic performance of students. The five-year Teacher Incentive Fund grant was awarded to Toledo Public Schools and the Toledo Federation of Teachers in 2006 through their partnership with the state of Ohio. The grant supports group rewards for entire school faculties for meeting student academic and attendance goals. Both TRACS and the Teacher Incentive Fund advance the concept of alternative compensation for classroom teachers and other educators based on factors such as excellence in teaching, assuming additional leadership roles and responsibilities, volunteering for placement in difficult teaching assignments, and/or meeting yearly academic and related goals collaboratively set by Toledo Public Schools and the Toledo Federation of Teachers.

Ray Marshall
Ray Marshall is professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin’s school of public affairs, where he holds the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs. He also is president of Ray Marshall Inc., a research and consulting firm.

Marshall was the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. He was also a national president of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Economy, Industrial Relations Research Association, and has worked at the American Economic Association and Council on Foreign Relations. Marshall is a member of the boards of the National Center on Education and the Economy, of which he is the chair, and the Economic Policy Institute.

Marshall is the author or co-author of more than 30 books and monographs, and approximately 200 articles and chapters. He earned his doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and honorary degrees from Rutgers University, the University of Maryland, Millsaps College, St. Edwards University, Bates College, Tulane University, Cleveland State University and Utah State University.

Michele McLaughlin
Michele McLaughlin is vice president of federal and state policy for Teach for America, where she leads state policy work that is focused primarily on teacher licensure and certification issues, and provides policy expertise to the government affairs team on federal education policy. She also manages relationships with a wide range of national policy and education associations for the Teach for America’s public affairs team. Prior to joining Teach for America, McLaughlin was the associate director of the educational issues department at the American Federation of Teachers, where she shepherded the AFT’s policy work on the No Child Left Behind Act. Michele also served as a program and policy analyst at the New Jersey Department of Education, and was previously a Catholic school teacher in New York City and Quito, Ecuador. A graduate of Fordham University, she holds a master’s degree in public affairs from the school of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dan Montgomery
Since 1993, Dan Montgomery has been an English teacher at Niles North High School in Skokie, Ill., where he has taught all levels of English in grades 9 through 12, and courses in mythology, composition, literature, film, creative writing and Bible studies. In 1994, the district named him winner of the Sallie Mae Award as best new teacher.

Montgomery has been a leader in his union, the Niles Township Federation of Teachers, since 1999. In 2002, he was elected president of the North Suburban Teachers Union, AFT Local 1274, representing more than 1,700 teachers and paraprofessionals in 14 school districts in the suburban Chicago area. He is also a vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and serves on the AFT K-12 Teachers program and policy council. He has been very involved in some high-profile AFT initiatives, including negotiating peer assistance and review in his local, developing a pilot for the Learning Rep program, and creating a K-12 math curriculum initiative in concert with district management. Since 2007, Montgomery has served on the board of directors of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, where he was recently nominated to be a vice chair.

Susan Moore Johnson
AFT Innovation Fund Advisory Board Member
Susan Moore Johnson is a Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr. Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She studies and teaches about teacher policy, organizational change and administrative practice. A former high school teacher and administrator, she continues to be interested in research on the work of teachers and the reform of schools. She has studied the leadership of superintendents, the effects of collective bargaining on schools, the use of incentive pay plans for teachers, and the school as a context for adult work. Her current work is examining how best to recruit, support and retain a strong teaching force in the next decade.

Ana Pomar
Ana Pomar is the Education Center director of Alliance AFT in Dallas. She started teaching in 1980 in Austin, Texas, after graduating from the University of Texas. Her experience spans the full spectrum of students from pre-K to college. She holds teaching certificates in K-12 and is a reading specialist, has taught in alternative certification programs since 1992, and has scored teacher certification tests for educational publisher Pearson Education in the areas of English as a Second Language, Spanish, reading and elementary education. Pomar has dedicated the last 13 years of her career to teaching teachers.

Linda Rerucha
Linda Rerucha has worked as a classroom teacher of reading and English for students in grades 7 through 12 and has taught college-level courses. For the Toledo (Ohio) Public Schools, she was a mentor and evaluator of new teachers, and an instructional planner. Her responsibilities included developing grade cards that reflected the state standards, organizing the alignment of standards with the curricula for the district, and working with school faculties to help them improve their student success rate. Finally, as a consultant, she worked with districts to help them improve their student proficiency scores, understand their data, and set measures for teacher incentive rewards.

Warren Simmons
AFT Innovation Fund Advisory Board Member
Warren Simmons is executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. Before joining the Institute in 1998, Simmons was executive director of the Philadelphia Education Fund, where he supported districtwide efforts to enact standards-based reform. Simmons also has designed and funded urban education research and policy initiatives at the National Institute of Education, the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Simmons has worked directly with schools as special assistant to the superintendent in Prince George’s County Public Schools, and as director of Race Equity Programs for the Mid-Atlantic Equity Center. He serves on the boards of several national and local education organizations, including the Public Education Network, the Merck Institute, the National Center on Education and the Economy, the Campaign for Educational Equity and the Cowen Institute’s National Advisory Council, and serves as adviser to PLATO Learning Inc.

Claire E. Sylvan
AFT Innovation Fund Advisory Board Member
Claire Sylvan is the founding executive director of Internationals Network for Public Schools, a national leader in educational innovation providing recent immigrant English language learners with a high-quality public education, pathways to college and full participation in democratic society. Internationals Network has substantially increased the number of affiliated International High Schools since its incorporation in 2004, while sustaining and deepening a dynamic collaborative network based on nearly a quarter century of excellence and school-based practice. Sylvan’s efforts at Internationals involve the organization’s strategy, core values, partnerships, leadership development and fundraising.

Prior to founding Internationals, Sylvan worked in diverse roles and settings spanning public secondary education, teacher education and community organizing. A nationally recognized expert and practitioner in both school reform and educating immigrant and English language learners, Sylvan has provided guidance on broad school reform initiatives in New York City and New York state as well as throughout the country. She has participated in local, state and national advisory boards, commissions and task forces on topics ranging from the development of state standards to the benefits and challenges of NCLB for English learners to the opening of new, small schools in New York City. Sylvan developed various innovative programs and practices for diverse populations of new learners of English in New York City public schools, led the Internationals Schools Partnership, and piloted the groundbreaking Early College Program at International High School at LaGuardia. She has authored various articles documenting the cross-section of educational reform and language development programs.

Uri Treisman
AFT Innovation Fund Advisory Board Member
Philip “Uri” Treisman is professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the executive director of the Charles A. Dana Center (www.utdanacenter.org). He chairs the steering committee of the Urban Mathematics Leadership Network—a coalition of 24 large urban districts together serving 4 million students that works to improve preK-12 mathematics teaching and learning. He serves on the Carnegie Corporation of New York-Institute for Advanced Study Commission on Mathematics and Science Education and is a member of the leadership team of the National Research Council’s Strategic Education Research Partnership (www.serpinstitute.org), which is focused on creating new knowledge to solve urgent problems of American education. Treisman is an adviser to the Aspen Institute’s Urban Superintendents Network, serves on the National Advisory Board of the Military Child Education Coalition, and is chief juror for a U.S. Army-sponsored study of mobility of military families and its effects on their children’s education. From 1995 to 2004, he served as president of the board of the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications. Treisman was a founding board member of the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education. From 2001-2006, he chaired the Chancellor’s Advisory Panel for Mathematics in New York City.

For his work on nurturing minority student high achievement in mathematics, Treisman was named a MacArthur Fellow from 1992 to 1997. In 1999, he was named one of the outstanding leaders of higher education in the 20th century by the magazine Black Issues in Higher Education. He was named “2006 Scientist of the Year” by the Harvard Foundation of Harvard University for his outstanding contributions to mathematics. In all his work, Treisman is an advocate for equity and excellence in education for all children.

Patricia A. Wasley
Patricia Wasley has been dean of the University of Washington College of Education since 2000. She has worked with college faculty and other colleagues across campus, and with the preK-12 community, to ensure that the college continues to expand its capacity to improve public education in Washington state through its research, teaching and partnership activities. Every program offered at the U.W. College of Education has been redesigned to ensure that its students are equipped to increase teacher performance in hard-to-serve schools.

A nationally recognized leader in education, Wasley has accumulated a substantial record of action-based research on the improvement of public education through teacher and administrator change and whole-school reform. She was the originating co-principal investigator on Teachers for a New Era, a $5 million grant awarded in 2003 to the University of Washington (as one of 11 universities) by Carnegie Corporation of New York aimed at strengthening preK-12 teaching by developing state-of-the art schools of education.

Linda White
Linda White is currently serving as a Secondary Induction Mentor Teacher in the Corpus Christi (Texas) Independent School District. Since 1998, she has provided mentoring and professional development opportunities that support new teachers and teachers in need of assistance. She has 38 years of experience in education.

White is a certified national trainer for the AFT’s Educational Research and Dissemination Program. Her areas of expertise include: foundations of effective teaching, effective teaching strategies, managing antisocial behavior; using data in the classroom, adult learning, delivering effective professional development, substitute teacher training, redesigning low-performing schools to raise student achievement and new teacher induction. She is also a Trainer of Trainers for the Texas Beginning Educator Support System, Understanding Poverty, and the Professional Development and Appraisal System.

George Williams
George Williams has been the head custodian at Lee Elementary School in Madison County, Fla., for the past 28 years as well as a Baptist minister for 26 years. He is currently a director of minority affairs for the Florida Education Association executive cabinet, chair of the FEA Educational Support Professionals program and policy council, a member of the AFT’s PSRP program and policy council, and the president of the American Association of Classified School Employees.

Eric Zachary
Eric Zachary is a senior project director in the Community Involvement Program for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. He designs and provides training and technical assistance programs to community-based groups that are organizing parents in low-income and working-class neighborhoods to improve their public schools. He has been the coordinator of the Community Collaborative to Improve Bronx Schools since its inception more than four years ago. He is also an associate clinical professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he teaches community organizing and public service. Previously, Zachary worked as a union organizer for Local 1199 of the Hospital and Health Care Workers Union. He also has extensive experience as a trainer in community-based settings. He was the coordinator of the City University of New York Parent Leadership Project, which provided comprehensive leadership training to leaders of parent associations in the New York City public schools, and spent several years developing training programs for block and tenant association leaders at the Citizens Committee for New York City. He holds a doctorate in social welfare from CUNY’s Graduate Center/Hunter College School of Social Work and a Master of Social Work in community organizing from the Hunter College School of Social Work. He has written about rebuilding a poor community by organizing parents to improve local public schools and about the role of leadership training in the rebuilding of poor and working-class urban communities.