Candidate for
Board Member; Palo Alto Unified School District

Family, Education, and Employment. I have five children. My children have attended many PAUSD schools, including Barron Park, Nixon, JLS, Terman, and Gunn. I was educated in public schools and received my B.A. and M.A. in Sociology, summa cum laude, from Yale. I earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Arizona. I was a faculty member in sociology at Northwestern University, left to join a startup in e-learning technology, worked on technology and education at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, moved to Netflix, and for the past seven and a half years have been a software engineer at Google working on search.

Deep Background in Educational Data and Policy. I spent many years consulting to various nonprofit and governmental organizations about educational data and achievement -- including the Education Trust, the Gates Foundation, and the US Department of Education. I know from experience that solving complex problems requires good data, clear metrics, and strong analytical capabilities. These have not been core strengths of PAUSD in the past, but they can be in the future and I will work hard to move the district in that direction.

A Record of Accomplishment in Our Schools. For the past four years I have led a group of concerned parents as we have advocated for full implementation of our community's Project Safety Net plan. I have worked for concrete improvements in emotional health in our district, and for improved achievement for all students.

These efforts been highly successful. For example, we advocated for a PAUSD committee on homework, I served on that committee and helped build consensus among its members, and the School Board adopted its recommendations for time and purpose guidelines for homework. I also successfully advocated for an overall PAUSD annual goal for reducing unnecessary academic stress, and for goals to improve counseling and reduce test and project scheduling. I will bring to the School Board that same commitment to building consensus, bringing data and research to bear on hard problems, and including the input of all stakeholders.