Our Board of Directors

The Education for Change Board of Directors serves as the governing body for our entire organization, including all school sites within the Education for Change family. All school sites also have school site Leadership Councils which advise the EFC Board on matters specific to each individual school. The EFC Board use these local site Councils as valuable sources of input, feedback, and guidance as they make decision on behalf of our entire organization in line with our mission, core values, and strategy.

Desten Broach
Desten Broach, a founding board member, is a Bay Area software marketing professional. He has held positions with ownership and management responsibility for numerous software products at Sun Microsystems, America Online, Netscape Communications, and Intuit, Inc. As an aide to U.S. Senator David Pryor, Mr. Broach focused on education as well as other issues. He graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with a B.A. in economics and earned an MBA from Stanford University?s Graduate School of Business.

Hae-Sin Thomas
Hae-Sin Kim Thomas is the cofounder and current CEO of urban ED solutions, a new nonprofit education consulting organization committed to improving academic outcomes for children in historically underserved urban centers across the country. The focus of urban ED solutions is to partner with leaders of schools and school districts to turn around schools that are either chronically failing or struggling to maintain gains. Ms. Thomas has more than 15 years of K-12 public education experience. Her work most recently has been in the school turnaround space, working with school districts and charter management organizations to turn around our city's lowest-performing schools.

Before urban ED solutions, Ms. Thomas was an employee of the Oakland Unified School District for 15 years - as a teacher, principal, school developer, and executive officer. The last three years, she led a team charged with designing and leading two key foundational tenets of Oakland Unified School District's nationally recognized reform effort Expect Success! creating quality school options for families in every neighborhood and ensuring smaller, more personalized communities of learning for all children. She was responsible for facilitating the design and opening of 22 new schools, replacing 18 chronically failing schools. A recent external evaluation of the new schools reform work in Oakland found that new schools more frequently accelerated math and English-language arts performance when compared to other district schools and that new schools significantly outperformed the schools they replaced in academic achievement, suspension rates, attendance rates, and overall student, teacher, and parent satisfaction.

Prior to that, she was the founding principal of ASCEND, one of the five original new small and autonomous schools opened in Oakland, California, a school recognized for accelerating achievement and engaging community. Ms. Thomas started teaching in Oakland through Teach for America in 1993 and continued teaching for six years before becoming a site administrator. During this time, she also worked as the Special Education school director for the Teach for America Summer Institute. She holds a B.A in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master's in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of San Francisco, and a Master's in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard University.

Jonathan Schorr
Jonathan Schorr is a partner in the San Francisco office of the NewSchools Venture Fund. Jonathan leads NewSchools' field building efforts, including the annual Summit and the Community of Practice, and oversees NewSchools' policy advocacy, publications, and public relations as well as data analysis. In addition, like other partners, Mr. Schorr has responsibility for investment strategy and management. He is also a lecturer at Stanford University's graduate school of education.

Prior to joining NewSchools, Mr. Schorr served as Director of New Initiatives at the KIPP Foundation, overseeing the Foundation's work in elementary schools and high schools and its services to its alumni nationwide. KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) is a family of more than 50 high-performing inner-city public schools.

Mr. Schorr has worked as an author, journalist, and teacher. His critically acclaimed first book, Hard Lessons: The Promise of an Inner-City Charter School, was published by Ballantine Books in the fall of 2002. The book was written under a fellowship from the Open Society Institute, where Schorr was a fellow. Previously, he was an education reporter with Oakland Tribune, and has also written on education in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Education Week, The Nation, Teacher Magazine, the Washington Monthly, Salon.com, and other publications. His writing has won numerous awards, including a national education writer's award and the Outstanding Young Journalist prize from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Jonathan graduated from Yale University with a degree in sociology in 1990. He taught public high school for three years in Southern California as a member of the founding corps of Teach for America before moving to Oakland, California, where he has lived since 1994.

Jeff Liaw
Jeffrey Liaw is an investment professional at TPG Capital, a global private equity investment firm, and is focused on the firm's efforts in industrials/manufacturing and energy & power investments. He serves on the board of directors of Graphic Packaging, a NYSE-listed consumer packaging company, Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU Corp), a leading integrated power company based in Dallas, and Oncor Electric Delivery, a leading transmission and distribution utility. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School with high distinction and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas.

Kevin Wooldridge
Kevin Wooldridge, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Education for Change, was previously an Executive Director in OUSD supervising 13 elementary schools. He has been a bilingual educator for 29 years, working in three Bay Area school districts at school sites and in the central office. He was a principal designer of OUSD bilingual program model. Mr. Wooldridge also has many years of experience implementing and supporting programs that use the arts to extend and enhance core literacy and mathematics programs. In collaboration with the Museum of Children's Art in Oakland, he has developed "The Art in Open Court: Making Connections" for use in kindergartens.