About

Joanne has dedicated her career to improving teaching and learning outcomes for all students. Her extensive experience in education policy and leadership has made her a sought-after advisor for policymakers, educators, and investors. Her work has helped to shape the national conversation on education reform and has impacted the lives of students across the country. Currently, she consults with state education agencies, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and investors to design policies, practices, products, and services that promote equity and excellence in education. She focuses largely on issues related to pK-12 standards, curriculum, professional learning, and assessment.

A Little More Background...

Joanne has held top leadership roles in federal government, venture philanthropy, and edtech. She was Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, from 2010-2013. In that capacity, she worked closely with the Secretary, the White House, and the Department’s policy, program, communications, and legal teams to develop and implement the Administration’s education agenda across early childhood, K-12, and higher education. She was responsible for managing the Department’s executive decision-making processes; leading the Department’s relationships with the national teachers’ unions, chief state school officers, and superintendents’ associations; directing the Department’s international work, including its relationship with the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills; and overseeing the operations of large parts of the Department.

In 2009, Joanne joined the Department of Education to lead its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top program. The program was a $4B competition among states to incentivize and support statewide, comprehensive education reform. It was bolstered by a large-scale competition among consortia of states to develop a new generation of statewide standardized assessments, and by an early learning challenge to improve the quality of education and care for preschoolers. She designed the policies to maximize impact, wrote the regulations, and ran fair, transparent, and high-integrity competitions. She coordinated these activities with key offices across the Department and with the Office of Management & Budget and the White House.

Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Joanne was the Chief Operating Officer and Managing Partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education for low-income children. During her eight-year tenure, Joanne helped lead and grow NewSchools from startup to maturity. During this period, NewSchools pioneered the venture philanthropy investment model, helped build and grow the charter management organization sector, seeded many educational technology companies, and was a key investor in innovative human capital solutions providers in education.

Before joining NewSchools, Joanne spent twenty years pioneering innovative, technology-based ways to increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning. She was co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and before that, Vice President of Products and Technologies at Academic Systems, a company that helped under-prepared college students succeed in college-level work. She spent most of her early career in K-12 education technology – first as Vice President of Education R&D at Wicat and then as Executive Vice President at Wasatch Education, focused on curriculum design and teacher professional development.

Joanne is currently involved in several organizations that are dedicated to improving education. She sits on the boards of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Center on Education and the Economy, and Teaching Strategies. She chairs the Investment Committee for Walton’s A-Street ventures. She is an Expert-in-Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-Lab), a Senior Fellow with FutureEd at Georgetown University, a former Distinguished Senior Fellow for the Education Commission of the States, a former visiting professor in education policy at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and a Fellow in the inaugural cohort of the Aspen/Pahara Education Leadership Fellowship. Joanne has been a member of many boards, including Aspire Public Schools, BloomBoard, Carnegie Learning, Green Dot Public Schools, Instruction Partners, Leadership Public Schools, Learn Zillion, New Leaders for New Schools, New Meridian (Steering Committee), Rocketship Education, Revolution Foods, and Teachscape. She was also a member of the School Finance Redesign Project (a project of the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education) and the Digital Media & Learning Project (a project of the MacArthur Foundation). Joanne holds a degree in biochemistry from Princeton University. She and her husband live in Washington, D.C.