BRYAN C. HASSEL is Co-Director of Public Impact. He consults nationally with leading public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and foundations working for dramatic improvements in K–12 education. He is a recognized expert on charter schools, school turnarounds, education entrepreneurship, and teacher and leader policy. His work has appeared in Education Next, Education Week, and numerous other publications; he blogs for Education Next and is a frequent guest blogger on other forums, such as Education Week. Dr. Hassel received his Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University and his master’s degree in politics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which he attended as a Morehead Scholar. He is a senior research affiliate with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and a nonresident senior fellow with Education Sector.
Example projects: Dr. Hassel’s recent work includes co-authoring Seizing Opportunity at the Top: How the U.S. Can Reach Every Child with an Effective Teacher, “The Big U-Turn: How to bring schools from the brink of doom to stellar success” for Education Next and Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He authored the Brookings Institution Press book The Charter School Challenge: Avoiding the Pitfalls, Fulfilling the Promise, co-edited the Brookings volume Learning from School Choice, and co-authored Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child’s School with Confidence. Dr. Hassel has also served as a consultant to leading efforts to create high-quality charter school systems, turn around failing schools, and improve leader and teacher effectiveness.
EMILY AYSCUE HASSEL is Co-Director of Public Impact. She provides thought leadership and oversight to Public Impact’s work on teacher and leader policy, organizational change, parental choice of schools, and emerging opportunities for dramatic improvement in pre–K to grade 12 education. Ms. Hassel is leading Public Impact’s effort to develop and refine school and staffing models for reaching more students with excellent teachers. Her work has appeared in Education Week, Education Next, and other publications; she blogs for Education Next and is a frequent guest blogger on other forums, such as Education Week. Ms. Hassel was named to the inaugural class of the Aspen Teacher Leader Fellows program, designed to cultivate and support teacher leaders who are working to improve the teaching profession and student outcomes. She was previously a consultant and manager for the Hay Group, a leading human resources consulting firm. Ms. Hassel received her law and master in business administration degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served on the North Carolina Law Review.
Example projects: As part of Public Impact’s effort to develop and refine school and staffing models for reaching more students with excellent teachers, Ms. Hassel co-authored 3X for All: Extending the Reach of Education’s Best; Opportunity at the Top; Seizing Opportunity at the Top: How the U.S. Can Reach Every Student with an Excellent Teacher; Teacher Tenure Reform; Measuring Teacher and Leader Performance; “The Big U-Turn: How to bring schools from the brink of doom to stellar success” for Education Next; Try, Try Again: How to Triple the Number of Fixed Failing Schools; Importing Leaders for School Turnarounds; Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best; the Public Impact series Competencies for Turnaround Success; School Restructuring Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When?; and Improving Teaching Through Pay for Contribution for the National Governor’s Association. Other work includes Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child’s School with Confidence; Choosing the Right Preschool eBook for TheSavvySource.com; and Learning Point Associates’ Professional Development: Learning from the Best, a toolkit for education leaders on designing and implementing effective professional development.
JOE ABLEIDINGER is a senior consultant with Public Impact. He consults and leads project teams focused on a variety of education policy issues, including redesigning school models and teachers’ roles to extend the reach of excellent teachers, online and blended learning and emerging technologies in education, teacher and leader policy, school turnarounds, and charter schools. Before joining Public Impact, Mr. Ableidinger taught high school English with the Fulbright Program in Korea and started a family resource center at an underperforming elementary school as an AmeriCorps VISTA member. Mr. Ableidinger received his B.A. with highest honors from Duke University, his master’s degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and his law degree with honors from Harvard Law School.
Example projects: Mr. Ableidinger serves as a strategic advisor to philanthropic foundations, charter authorizers, and education-focused nonprofit organizations. He conducts policy research and development to help 50CAN (the 50-state Campaign for Achievement Now) and its state affiliates RI-CAN and MinnCAN close America’s achievement gaps by building public support for proven models of effective public education.
Mr. Ableidinger led a major effort on behalf of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) to evaluate the charter sector’s progress and to recommend bold actions to capitalize on the sector’s successes while confronting persistent challenges. The resulting report, Fulfilling the Compact: Building a Breakthrough, Results-Driven Public Charter School Sector, was featured at NAPCS’s 2012 national conference. Mr. Ableidinger served on a team of writers for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ Cyber Series, co-authoring a policy guide on online and blended charter schools and an issue brief on successfully authorizing blended charter schools. Mr. Ableidinger has presented to national audiences on topics including online and blended learning, extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students and building an opportunity culture for teachers, and charter incubation.
Mr. Ableidinger co-authored Kick-Starting Reform: Three City-Based Organizations Showing How to Transform Public Education, for the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust); Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter School Sector, for CEE-Trust and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations, for the National Charter School Resource Center; Going Exponential: Growing the Charter Sector’s Best, for the Progressive Policy Institute; Leading Indicators of School Turnarounds: How to Know when Dramatic Change is on Track, for the Darden/Curry Partners for Leadership in Education and the School Turnaround Specialist Program at the University of Virginia; School Turnarounds in Colorado: Untangling a Web of Supports for Struggling Schools, for the Donnell-Kay Foundation; Teacher Tenure Reform: Applying Lessons from the Civil Service and Higher Education and Shooting for Stars: Cross-Sector Lessons for Retaining High-Performing Educators, for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Joyce Foundation; and Free to Lead: Autonomy in Highly Successful Charter Schools, for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He also contributed to The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning, by Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker, published by Innosight Institute.
SHARON KEBSCHULL BARRETT is a senior editor with Public Impact. She edits the Public Impact and Opportunity Culture blogs, copyedits Public Impact’s reports, and provides research and writing for the firm. Her recent work focuses on extending the reach of excellent teachers, charter schools, and state policy. A former newspaper reporter and copy editor, Ms. Barrett is the author of two cookbooks, Desserts from an Herb Garden and Morning Glories (St. Martin’s Press). She has a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served as editor of The Daily Tar Heel.
Example projects: Ms. Barrett co-authored “Turnaround Principal Competencies: A process for hiring the most skillful leaders for the demands of changing the fortunes of the most-troubled schools” for the August 2012 School Administrator magazine. She co-authored Kick-Starting Reform: Three City-Based Organizations Showing How to Transform Public Education, for the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust).
KELLY BLESSING is a research analyst with Public Impact, where she supports project teams by conducting research, compiling and analyzing school outcome data, and developing methods and models for presenting education data. Additionally, she assists the editorial team. Formerly, Ms. Blessing interned as a reporter at Bloomberg, The Washington Post and worked for her college newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. She graduated with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in economics and a minor in business journalism.
LYRIA BOAST is a senior consultant at Public Impact. She is the organization’s analytics team coordinator and serves on the firmwide management team. Ms. Boast leads Public Impact’s work to improve charter school authorizers’ academic performance frameworks and to develop a national database of authorizers and their schools. She has also contributed to projects on post-Katrina education reform in New Orleans, extending the reach of excellent teachers, and evaluating school turnarounds. Ms. Boast has been a research assistant in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a research analyst at Abt Associates, where she conducted large survey research projects under contract for the federal government. She holds a B.A. in English and economics from Wellesley College.
GRETCHEN BRUCE is the human resources coordinator and business operations assistant at Public Impact. She coordinates hiring, training, and event planning, and contributes to special projects as needed. Ms. Bruce previously worked in a consulting practice for state and local governments within a large professional services firm. She holds a B.A. in journalism from Texas A&M University.
DANIELA DOYLE is a senior consultant with Public Impact. Her work addresses a wide range of education issues, including teacher quality, school finance, turnarounds, and redesigning school models and teachers’ roles to extend the reach of excellent teachers. Ms. Doyle co-authored Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation Systems, which won the 2012 “Most Actionable Research” Eddies! award from the PIE Network. A former elementary school teacher, she is an alumna of Teach For America and Education Pioneers, a nonprofit bringing innovative leaders to education. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University, a master’s degree in science for teachers from Pace University, and a master’s degree in public policy from Duke University.
Example projects: Ms. Doyle is currently focusing on school finance reform at the state level, new and developing teacher evaluation systems, and an evaluation of two school turnaround programs. Other recent work includes research on funding parity between charter and district-run schools; research into charter facility funding; a review of charter schools in a Midwest state; and cross-sector and international research to improve performance management systems in public education.
Ms. Doyle has co-authored these recent publications: Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation Systems; Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools; Funding a Better Education: Conclusions from the First Three Years of Student-Based Budgeting in Hartford; Student-Based Budgeting: A Better Way to Fund Students and Performance; Developing Education Talent Pipelines for Charter Schools: A Citywide Approach, for the National Charter School Resource Center; Developing City-Based Funding Strategies: Investments to Create a Robust Charter Sector, for the National Charter School Resource Center; Leading Approaches to Philanthropic Investment in the Charter Sector: A Scan of Four Cities; A Student-Based Funding Model for Washington, and Student-Based Budgeting: Revamping School Funding in Washington to Improve Performance, for Partnership for Learning; Performance Guarantees in Education: Shifting Risk to Create Opportunity, for the American Enterprise Institute; Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists, for Ball State University; and The Tab: How Connecticut Can Fix its Dysfunctional Education Spending System to Reward Success, Incentivize Choice, and Boost Student Achievement, for ConnCAN.
TIM FIELD is a senior policy fellow with Public Impact. He consults and leads project teams to provide clients with research-based guidance on a wide range of policy and school management issues, including school turnarounds; charter school quality; and educator effectiveness, evaluation, retention, and compensation. Mr. Field is leading Public Impact’s work to support state education departments as they implement school turnaround strategies funded by the Race to the Top competition.
Before joining Public Impact, Mr. Field was a regional director for the KIPP Foundation, where he provided coaching support to KIPP executive directors, coordinated internal and external resources, and provided quality oversight to ensure that KIPP regions are prepared to open and sustain high-performing schools in their communities. Before that, Mr. Field was the deputy chief of Charter, Partnership and New Schools with the School District of Philadelphia, where he designed and managed key elements of the district’s Renaissance School initiative to turn around chronically failing schools. He began working for the Philadelphia schools as a resident from the Broad Foundation’s Residency in Urban Education, a national and highly selective two-year management development program that recruits and trains emerging leaders for senior management positions in public education. He earned his B.A. from Oberlin College, and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
ANNE HALSTATER is an operations assistant at Public Impact, where she helps the administrative team with internal operations. After a career in electrical engineering, Ms. Halstater was an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles. She holds a bachelor’s degree in ceramic engineering and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University.
JIYE GRACE HAN is a consultant with Public Impact. Her work addresses a variety of topics, including retaining and extending the reach of high-performing teachers, teacher and leader quality, finance reform, and technology in education. Ms. Han co-authored Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation Systems, which won the 2012 “Most Actionable Research” Eddies! Award from the PIE Network. Before joining Public Impact, she served as a Teach For America corps member working in a high-poverty school. In 2011, she was named a national finalist for the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to second-year Teach For America corps members who embody and demonstrate the leadership needed to have an exemplary level of transformational impact with students. She wrote about that teaching experience on Impatient Optimists. Ms. Han produced multiple grade levels of progress with her fifth-graders across subjects each year, as well as developing their critical thinking skills and level of learning engagement. She has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s in teaching from Dominican University.
Example projects: Ms. Han has recently co-authored Quakertown Community School District: A Systematic Approach to Blended Learning that Focuses on District Leaadership, Staffing, and Cost-effectiveness, and contributed to A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning.
ELAINE HARGRAVE is a research assistant at Public Impact, where she supports projects by gathering research, assisting in the production of reports and presentations, and overseeing data collection efforts. Ms. Hargrave previously worked for a London law firm advising clients on intellectual property rights. She also managed a bank in Oxford, England, and provided financial planning advice to bank clients. For the biostatistics department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ms. Hargrave conducted research on public health projects including breast cancer, HPV vaccination, and teen smoking. She graduated from the University of Exeter, England, with a B.A. with honors in politics.
CHRISTEN HOLLY is an associate consultant with Public Impact, conducting research and quantitative and qualitative analyses. She is working on projects addressing leading indicators of school turnaround success, cost and sustainability of school turnaround efforts, state takeovers of failing schools, and the next generation of policies to encourage charter school excellence. Before coming to Public Impact, she was a lecturer in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked in policy advisory roles at the state and federal level in both the public and private sectors, as well as working in the financial services industry. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master’s degree in economics from New York University, and a B.A. in economics from Duke University.
TOM KOESTER is a research analyst with Public Impact. His work centers on examining school outcome data, developing quantitative models, analyzing state policy, and devising innovative and compelling methods for presenting education data. Before joining Public Impact, Mr. Koester worked as a site supervisor in New Orleans with Americorps, overseeing the rebuilding of homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Koester graduated with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wih a B.A.
in economics and a minor in Arabic.
GILLIAN LOCKE is a consultant with Public Impact, conducting research and quantitative and qualitative analyses. Her recent work has focused on a variety of education policy issues, including charter school quality, virtual school accountability, school turnarounds, and school finance. Prior to joining Public Impact, she was the grants manager at Laying the Foundation, a nonprofit teacher training organization in Dallas. She also spent two years as a financial analyst in the real estate and infrastructure investment groups in the Dallas office of the Goldman Sachs principal investment area. A summa cum laude graduate of Austin College, Ms. Locke holds a master’s degree in public policy from Duke University.
ANGIE SPONG is a consultant with Public Impact, working on teacher and leader quality, school turnarounds, charter school quality, and school finance. Before joining Public Impact, Ms. Spong taught English in a public middle school in rural Japan. She also served as an AmeriCorps VISTA member in Burlington, Vt. Ms. Spong graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she was initiated into the Davis Society and named Graduating Pro Bono Student of the Year, and is a summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University.
LUCY STEINER is a consulting manager with Public Impact, where she leads complex projects, manages and develops other consultants, and serves on the firmwide management team. She and her project teams deliver research, training, and consulting on a variety of critical education issues, including teacher and leader policy, school restructuring, charter school policy, and teacher professional development. Her work often provides a bridge between district leadership, school leadership, and instruction. A former high school English teacher, Ms. Steiner holds a master’s degree in education and social policy from Northwestern University, and a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Example Projects: In the area of teacher and leader policy, Ms. Steiner’s recent work includes leading Public Impact’s consulting with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ Project L.I.F.T. to implement the firm’s Opportunity Culture initiative, which extends the reach of excellent teachers through job redesign and technology; co-authoring an extensive selection, development, and evaluation Opportunity Culture toolkit; and co-authoring an article for School Administrator magazine on turnaround principal competencies. As part of her work for the Barksdale Reading Institute, she is leading a three-year evaluation of four turnaround schools in Mississippi, with a focus on whether principals are using the leader actions associated with successful organizational turnarounds. In addition, she has led workshops and webinars with school, district, and state policymakers on using competency-based screening and hiring practices to improve leadership in chronically failing schools.
Ms. Steiner’s charter school policy work includes leading Public Impact’s partnership with the National Charter School Resource Center and advising foundations on charter school investment. Recent work includes co-authoring papers on incubating high-quality charter schools, developing talent pipelines for charter schools, and developing city-based funding strategies, all for the National Charter School Resource Center; co-authoring a paper on “Fulfilling the Compact” for the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools; and co-authoring a paper on leading approaches to philanthropic investment in the charter sector for Baptist Community Ministries.
BEVERLEY TYNDALL is the production and communications coordinator at Public Impact. She helps Public Impact’s co-directors improve operations, and she coordinates several functions, including publications production, our website, and social media. She also contributes her skills to client projects. Ms. Tyndall previously worked in advertising and as production coordinator for J. Crew Catalog in New York City. Since earning a certificate in film from New York University, she has worked as a video editor and producer. Her credits include numerous educational and nonprofit videos, including a series on the Rural Community College Initiative, produced for the Ford Foundation. Ms. Tyndall is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in English.
CAROL WILLIAMS is the office manager for Public Impact. She coordinates Public Impact’s financial, technology, and office operations. Before joining Public Impact, Ms. Williams worked as a medical technologist and as a laboratory information systems analyst, where she was responsible for maintaining laboratory databases and laboratory-to-hospital interfaces. Her work in education includes serving as a preschool teaching assistant and an academic advisor for the athletics department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
BRENDAN YORKE is a research analyst with Public Impact, collecting, analyzing, and communicating school outcome and student achievement data. Prior to joining Public Impact, Mr. Yorke coordinated multicultural programming for middle and high school students in North Carolina, the Arctic, and Ghana. As part of a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Mr. Yorke has also investigated the effect of adolescents’ peers on depression and anxiety. He graduated with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in psychology and a minor in entrepreneurship.
