NTC Board of Directors

Lance Fors received his BA from UC-Berkeley and his PhD from the California Institute of Technology, both in molecular biology. He then founded and built Third Wave Technologies. During his CEO tenure at Third Wave, from 1994 through 2004, Dr. Fors led its growth from a concept to a leading molecular diagnostic firm with a $500 million market value and $50 million in revenues. During his undergraduate and graduate school years, entrepreneurial activities included assembling a large real estate investment portfolio that he continues to own and manage. Since 2005 Dr. Fors has focused on social entrepreneurship, founding and building a leading provider of special needs housing, and venture philanthropy, currently serving as Chairman of Reading Partners, SV2, and New Teacher Center, and Vice-Chairman of the Silicon Valley Children’s Fund, where he plays an active role in helping those organizations increase their impact by up to 100% per year. Dr. Fors is also lead director and co-owner of Lance Construction Supplies, an inventor on dozens of patents, and received an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Lincoln Caplan has been managing partner of SeaChange Capital Partners, a nonprofit finance firm, since it was founded in 2006. Based in New York City, SeaChange arranges substantial fundings of outstanding nonprofit organizations involved in education reform and youth development for low-income young people in the United States (www.seachangecap.org). SeaChange also fosters collaborations between nonprofit organizations that will be able to sustain durable programs by merging, coming together in an alliance, or otherwise cooperating. The firm is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Group, Goldman Sachs Group, and other funders.

From 1998 until 2006, Mr. Caplan was the Knight Senior Journalist at Yale Law School, where he was the editor and president of Legal Affairs magazine (www.legalaffairs.org). He also taught nonfiction writing at the law school and in the English Department of Yale University. He is the author of five books: Up Against the Law: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court; Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire; An Open Adoption; The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule of Law; and The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and for The New Republic and has written for many other newspapers and magazines. He has also been an editor at U.S. News & World Report, where he supervised U.S. News Online and the magazine’s special projects about education. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and has been a Harvard Scholar at Cambridge University, a White House Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Angela M. Covert is an independent Education Consultant. Currently she is serving as the lead site evaluator for the University of Washington Teachers for a New Era Project, and, as Senior Advisor to the New Teacher Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She also serves as Senior Consultant in the Higher Education Program at Carnegie Corporation of New York where her major focus is on teacher quality.

From 1991 until 2003 Dr. Covert was Program Officer and Director of the Pre-collegiate Education and Youth Development Programs at The Atlantic Philanthropies (USA), Inc. She was responsible for the national grantmaking program that encompassed school improvement; teacher preparation and development; effective uses of technologies in education; and non-school based youth development programs, with an emphasis on programs engaging youth in community service and volunteerism.

Prior to her work at Atlantic Philanthropies, Ms Covert had extensive experience in a range of education settings from early childhood to higher education. She was Executive Director of the Literacy Assistance Center in New York City and also held positions at the Helen Keller National Center, and Bank Street College. She was also the founding Coordinator of the New York City Education Policy Fellowship Program (EPFP) of the Institute for Educational Leadership.

She has consulted with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where, among other activities, she lead a team in conducting a mid-point evaluation of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC); and the Ford Foundation where she conducted a review of their grantmaking portfolio on teacher quality. Other consultancies include The Goldman Sachs Foundation; Learning Together, Inc.; the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF); The College Board; and, McGraw Hill Education.

She serves on the Boards of Directors for Jobs for the Future (JFF) in Boston and the Center on Education Policy (CEP) in Washington, DC.

She holds an Ed.D in Urban Education and Public Policy from Fordham University.

Kenji Hakuta is the Lee J. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. An experimental psycholinguist by training, he is best known for his work in the areas of bilingualism and the acquisition of English in immigrant students. He is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. He chaired a National Academy of Sciences report Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children, and coedited a book on affirmative action in higher education, Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education. Hakuta is also active in education policy. He has testified to Congress and other public bodies on a variety of topics, including language policy, the education of language minority students, affirmative action in higher education, and improvement of quality in educational research. He has served as an expert witness in education litigation involving language minority students.

Hakuta received his BA Magna Cum Laude in Psychology and Social Relations, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, both from Harvard University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1989, except for three years (2003-2006) when he helped start the University of California at Merced as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. His prior academic appointments have been at Yale University (Psychology), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (Education). He was a Fellow at the Center Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is an elected Member of the National Academy of Education and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Linguistics and Language Sciences). He currently serves on the Board of the Educational Testing Service, and is Vice-Chair of the Board of the Spencer Foundation.

Roger King has worked with non-profits on strategy, going-to-scale, and organizational development since the early 1990s. He was a consultant with Bain & Company, an international strategy consulting firm, from 1983 to 1992. He holds an AB and an MBA from Harvard University.

His clients include:

• City Year (Boston, MA)
• Civic Ventures & Experience Corps (San Francisco, CA)
• Developmental Studies Center (Oakland, CA)
• Institute for Research & Reform in Education (Philadelphia, PA)
• New Teacher Center (Santa Cruz, CA)
• National Writing Project (Berkeley, CA)
• Sports4Kids (Oakland, CA)

Julie Mikuta is a Partner in NewSchools Venture Fund’s West Coast office, where she focuses on investment strategy, human capital and management assistance to the firm’s portfolio ventures. She serves on the board of directors of Connect the Dots, Inner City Education Foundation, KIPP DC, Pacific Charter School Development, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC), Envision Schools, and The New Teacher Project (TNTP).

Prior to joining NewSchools, Julie was Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at EdBuild. Previously, she led trainings for school board and superintendent-teams of large urban districts at the Center for Reform of School Systems, through an initiative supported by The Broad Foundation. Julie also served as an elected member of the D.C. Board of Education from 2001 until 2004. During her time on the School Board, Julie also worked as Vice President of Alumni Affairs for Teach For America, where she developed programming for the organization’s 10,000 alumni. She also helped found Washington DC’s SEED Public Charter School, interned at the White House Domestic Policy Council, and served on the DC Public Charter School Board’s application review and monitoring teams. Julie began her career in education teaching high school science in New Orleans through Teach For America.

Julie completed her doctorate at Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar. She graduated from Georgetown University, where she was captain of the women’s basketball team.

Rod is a Partner at New Profit, and advises New Profit and its portfolio enterprises on matters of strategy, organization, and leadership. He serves as the portfolio manager for Year Up.

Rod’s primary passion is helping social entrepreneurs and other innovative leaders build, scale, and lead high performance social enterprises that deliver innovative, sustainable, and powerful solutions to critical social problems.

Rod spent most of his prior career leading complex, large-scale, organization transformation and improvement efforts, alternating between general management and chief human resource officer roles, domestically and internationally, in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. At Herman Miller, Inc., Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, and VeriSign, Inc, he restructured and led global HR organizations designed to drive improvements in individual, business unit, and corporate performance. While at Herman Miller, an icon of enlightened capitalism and corporate social responsibility, he also served as President of Herman Miller East Asia, and led the turnaround of that organization into the highest performing business unit in the consolidated company. He began his private sector career with IBM in marketing, IS consulting, and government relations, and with Merrill Lynch Capital Markets in investment banking.

Rod was a White House Fellow in the first Bush Administration (41), and served in the State Department as special assistant to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He later served as Assistant Secretary for Management at the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton Administration, where he led the effort to reinvent the $30 billion, 5,000-employee, cabinet-level department into a more strategically managed and high- performance organization. He was the founding CEO of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit he launched on behalf of the Governor of Louisiana to assist victims of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina by better coordinating the humanitarian aid of more than 150 nonprofit, public, and private sector organizations. LFRC was singled out by former President Clinton as a model for cross-sector, domestic disaster relief efforts.

Rod graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics and Religion. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion in Social Ethics from Yale University Divinity School. He earned a Master of Public Policy in Human Services, Labor, and Education Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he was twice selected a Kennedy Fellow.

Rod loves Ashtanga yoga, live performances of smooth jazz, and travel to beautiful islands and world-class cities (especially, Paris, New York, Melbourne, and Sydney).

Ellen Moir is Chief Executive Officer of the New Teacher Center (NTC), a national organization dedicated to improving student learning by accelerating the effectiveness of teachers and school leaders. She is recognized as a passionate advocate for our nation’s newest teachers.

Ellen founded NTC in 1998 to scale high quality teacher induction services to a national audience. NTC strengthens school communities through proven mentoring and professional development programs, online learning environments, policy advocacy, and research. Today NTC has a staff of over 150 who work closely with educators and policymakers across the country. NTC seeks to insure that the nation’s low-income, minority, and English language learners, those students most often taught by inexperienced teachers, have the opportunity to receive an excellent education.

Ellen is widely recognized for her work in beginning teacher development and school reform. She has extensive experience in public education, having previously served as Director of Teacher Education at the University of California at Santa Cruz and worked as a bilingual teacher. Major awards include the 2008 National Staff Development Council Contribution to the Field award; the 2008 Full Circle Fund Impact Award; the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. 2005 Prize in Education; and the 2003 California Council on Teacher Education Distinguished Teacher Educator Award.