Meet Our Guests

The Future of Tutoring

Raised in Portland, Oregon, Liz Cohen stumbled into education policy more than 20 years ago. In 2003, she signed up as a volunteer summer-school teacher in DC’s Anacostia neighborhood. She then changed her career plans and never looked back. As Vice President of Policy at 50Can, Liz is a recognized expert with nearly two decades of experience as an analyst and advisor in the K-12 education space. Liz is the author of The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives (Harvard Education Press).

Imagine Learning

Sari Factor is vice chair & chief strategy officer at Imagine Learning. She began her career as a mathematics teacher but soon thought of much bigger ways to impact students. Sari has worked for over 40 years in K–12 publishing, technology, and services, focused on leveraging technology to improve educational outcomes and make quality education more accessible to all learners. Sari joined Imagine Learning in 2011, where she served as CEO of Edgenuity for a decade prior to her current role, and has held leadership positions at Kaplan, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and Everyday Learning Corporation.

District C

Dan Gonzalez studied engineering at Dartmouth College before becoming a high school physics teacher. After teaching, Dan joined Manhattan Prep, a global leader in test preparation. He became president of the company in 2011 shortly after it was acquired by Kaplan. Dan is now the CEO & Co-Founder of District C, a national nonprofit that prepares the next generation of diverse talent for modern work. District C's flagship program, called Teamship, is a reimagined internship where teams of students solve real problems for real businesses. Since 2017, over 9,000 Teamship students have worked on real problems for 650 businesses, including main street cafes, tech startups, and corporations such as IBM, Deloitte, and Epic Games.

Aspen Institute

Dr. Janice K. Jackson serves as Executive Director of the Education & Society Program within the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute. Janice has dedicated her career to ensuring every young person has access to a high-quality education that prepares them for a bright future. She is perhaps best known for serving as CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2017-2021, leading the nation’s third-largest school district with more than 355,000 students, 38,000 employees, and a $7 billion annual budget. During her tenure, CPS was nationally recognized for record-breaking improvements in academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and post-secondary completion.

KIPP Foundation

Jim has been a leader and visionary in the education field for more than 30 years. His career has been marked by an unwavering dedication to academic excellence and a deep commitment to fostering joy in the learning process. As Chief Schools Officer at the KIPP Foundation, Jim works collaboratively with our regions and schools to produce exemplary student outcomes, align schools around common instructional practices, and enact our values rooted in an unyielding conviction in the brilliance of our students.

Coursemojo

Dacia Toll is cofounder and co-CEO of Coursemojo, which has developed a curriculum-aligned, AI-powered teaching assistant that is leading to impressive gains in ELA achievement and teacher satisfaction. In 1999, Dacia became the founding principal of Amistad Academy in New Haven, Conn., which went on to post the greatest achievement gains of any middle school in the state. Dacia then cofounded and coled Achievement First (AF), which became one of the nation's leading charter school networks with 41 schools across the Northeast, and college graduation rates that were five times peer averages. Dacia left Achievement First in July 2021 to launch Coursemojo.