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Teachscape Board of Directors
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Mark Atkinson
Chief Executive Officer
Mark Atkinson has been Chief Executive Officer of Teachscape since July 1999. Prior to founding Teachscape, Mr. Atkinson was a network news producer with extensive experience in reporting, producing, and directing network news documentaries. He was Senior Producer and Manager of New Markets for CBS News Productions, where he developed new business opportunities, focusing on multimedia production and the education market. In his role as Senior Producer, CBS News Productions, he directed the production of The 20th Century with Mike Wallace, a nightly one-hour nonfiction television series for The History Channel. Prior to joining CBS, he was a producer for Peter Jennings Reporting, ABC News, where he produced network news specials for Mr. Jennings. A graduate of Yale University, Mr. Atkinson is a trustee of the Oracle Education Foundation.
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Michael Finnerty
Director
Michael Finnerty served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of Teachscape from December 2000 through September 2004. Prior to joining Teachscape, Mr. Finnerty served as an Officer of Edison Schools Inc. from its inception in 1992, participating in every aspect of the development of the company, from conceptual product design and business plan development to current operations in 21 states generating more than $350 million in annual revenue. Mr. Finnerty brings to Teachscape a strong background in finance and operations management. As Edison's Chief Financial Officer, he oversaw all capital finance, accounting, payroll, banking, and risk management. At Edison, he moved into the role of Executive Vice President for School Operations, where he managed the role-out of Edison programs to client school districts and Charter School Boards, to create and operate Edison Schools. Prior to his career with Edison, Mr. Finnerty served as Chief Financial and Administrative Officer at Yale University. Before that, he served as Budget Director for New York's Governor Cuomo and Chief of Staff for New York's Governor Hugh Carey. A graduate of Manhattan College, Mr. Finnerty holds a master's in Public Administration from New York University.
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Robert Finzi
Co-Managing Partner, Sprout Group
Bob Finzi joined Sprout as General Partner in May 1991, when Sprout assumed management of two public venture capital funds originated by Merrill Lynch, and became Co-Managing Partner in November 2003. Prior to that, Mr. Finzi joined Merrill Lynch Venture Capital, Inc. in 1984 and became a partner in 1985. Previously, he was an associate with Menlo Ventures and served as a consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Mr. Finzi attended Harvard Business School (M.B.A., Baker Scholar, Loeb Rhoades Fellow) and Lehigh University (B.S., with Highest Honors; M.S., Byllesby Fellow).
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Janet Hickey
Co-Managing Partner, Sprout Group
Janet Hickey joined Sprout in 1985 as a General Partner and became Co-Managing Partner in November 2003. She previously served as Senior Vice President of Venture Investments for the General Electric Investment Corp., which she joined in 1970. Ms. Hickey held a variety of positions at GE, including Trustee of the General Electric Pension Trust (12 years) and Director of Research and Manager-Pension Trust Equities. She was also a securities analyst at Eastman, Dillon, Union Securities. Ms. Hickey, who attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of St. Andrews, is a former Director of the National Venture Capital Association, an original inductee in the "Private Equity Hall of Fame," and a Trustee of Mount Holyoke College.
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Andrew Kaplan
General Partner, Quad Partners
Prior to joining Quad, Andrew Kaplan was a business manager at several leading education companies. Before joining Kaplan, Inc. as a senior executive, he served as Director of the Educational Technology Group at Scholastic. Mr. Kaplan holds an M.B.A. from NYU's Stern Business School and a B.A. in Computer Science from Brandeis University.
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Roy Pea
Director, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University
Roy Pea, who co-founded Teachscape in 1999, is a Stanford University Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences and Director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (http://scil.stanford.edu). He has published 130 chapters and articles on such topics as distributed cognition, learning and education fostered by advanced technologies (e.g., scientific visualization), online communities, digital video collaboratories, and wireless handheld computers (http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea). Dr. Pea's current work is addressing new paradigms for everyday networked video interactions, and how informal and formal learning can be better understood and connected. Co-author of the National Academy Press's How People Learn, Dr. Pea is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education, American Psychological Society, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. An IBM Faculty Fellow in 2006, he received a doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
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James Regan
General Partner, Harbourton Enterprises
James (Jay) Regan is a general partner in Harbourton Enterprises, which oversees the investments of his family office. These investments range from technical trading programs to private equity and venture capital. Mr. Regan has been in the investment field since 1964, having worked at White, Weld & Co. and Kidder, Peabody & Co. In addition, he was President of Oakley Sutton Securities Corp., a registered broker-dealer, and for 20 years was the Managing General Partner of Princeton/Newport Partners, a private investment partnership which managed approximately $250 million of capital on behalf of 90 limited partners. Mr. Regan is a former trustee of Princeton Day School, where he served as Vice-Chairman. He is a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Ballet Theatre in New York City. Mr. Regan is also an active board member of many charitable organizations, including the Young Scholars' Institute, Inc., in Trenton, New Jersey, and the Harbourton Foundation, where he serves as President. Mr. Regan received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and attended New York University Graduate School of Business Administration. He serves on the board of many companies in which Harbourton made investments.
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David Sherman
Office of the President, American Federation of Teachers
David Sherman currently serves as a consultant in the Office of the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Washington, DC, where he is coordinating the AFT's work in preparation for the reauthorization of NCLB (No Child Left Behind). Mr. Sherman has been a public school teacher in Spanish Harlem, Brownsville, and Fort Greene (Brooklyn), communities in and around New York City. For several years at Public School 307 in Brooklyn, he served as a Title I reading teacher. He also served as a teacher on special assignment at the central headquarters of the New York City Board of Education, where he became the Director of the Office of State and Federal Programs. In 1980, Mr. Sherman was hired by Albert Shanker to develop an "educational arm" for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, for whom he launched the UFT Teacher Center, the Dial-A-Teacher and parent outreach program, the Peer Intervention Program, and others. He was the union's liaison to the school system and over the years collaborated very closely with district and community organizations in launching the Chancellor's District (an early national model for turning around low-performing schools) and the New Vision schools (the nation's first small schools initiative), among others. Mr. Sherman became the UFT Vice President in 1991 and remained in that position through 2004. He also served as a member and co-chair of the New York State Title I Committee of Practitioners, and was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education's Negotiated Rulemaking Committee on Title I and NCLB during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
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Marshall S. Smith
Program Director, Education, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Marshall (Mike) S. Smith has been Program Director for Education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, since 2001. Prior to that, he was Acting Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Education in the Clinton Administration. During the Carter Administration, Mr. Smith was Chief of Staff to the Secretary for Education and Assistant Commissioner for Policy Studies in the Office of Education. While not in government, he was at different times an Assistant Professor at Harvard, and a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University, where he was also Dean of the School of Education. A member of the National Academy of Education, Mr. Smith has authored numerous publications on topics ranging from computer content analysis to early childhood education to effective schools and standards-based reform.
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Jane Swift
Partner, Arcadia Partners
Jane Swift joined Arcadia Partners in May 2003. In addition to her work at Arcadia, Ms. Swift speaks professionally on women's leadership, education improvement, and work-family integration, and she recently completed a fellowship at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Ms. Swift, who is currently a Director at Teachscape and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, served as the Governor of Massachusetts from April 2001 until January 2003. She was the first woman to do so and the first governor to give birth while in office. As the Chief Executive of the nation's 13th largest state, she was responsible for overseeing a $23 billion annual operating budget, and for setting strategic direction for 13 cabinet agencies and divisions. Ms. Swift focused on improving the state's education system and directed a review of early education programs and services, and also spearheaded improvements to the state's adult education and training programs. She successfully implemented many critical but controversial components of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act, which, as a state senator, she helped write in 1993. Combining statewide curriculum frameworks with rigorous standards and a superior assessment system, the Massachusetts law has been recognized as one of the most successful reform acts in the country. Ms. Swift received a B.A. in American Studies from Trinity College and has received six honorary doctorates, as well as numerous awards.
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Joanne Weiss
Partner & COO, NewSchools Venture Fund
Joanne Weiss is Partner and Chief Operating Officer at NewSchools Venture Fund, where she focuses on investments and management assistance to portfolio ventures in the Performance Accelerator Fund and oversees the organization's operations. Prior to joining NewSchools Venture Fund, Ms. Weiss was CEO of Claria Corporation, an e-services recruiting firm that helped emerging-growth companies build their teams quickly and well. Before her tenure at Claria, she spent 20 years in the design, development, and marketing of technology-based products and services for education. Ms. Weiss was Senior Vice President of Product Development at Pensare, an e-learning company that created business innovation programs for the Fortune 500 market. Prior to Pensare, she was co-founder, interim CEO, and Vice President of Products and Technologies at Academic Systems, a company that helps hundreds of thousands of college students prepare for college-level work in mathematics and English. In the early 1990s, Joanne was Executive Vice President of Business Operations at Wasatch Education Systems, where she led the product development, customer service, and operations organizations for this K–12 educational technology company. She began her career as Vice President of Education R&D at Wicat Systems, where she was responsible for the development of nearly 100 multimedia curriculum products for K–12 schools. Ms. Weiss, who holds a degree in biochemistry from Princeton University, has spent much of her career pioneering innovative ways of using technology to increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning processes.
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