Career Path of an Executive Director at Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools

My career path has been different than I expected. When I was in undergrad, I started pre-med. I majored in women's studies and took many science classes. Right before my senior year, I decided against medical school.

I was very interested in social justice issues. So, I applied to Teach for America, a program that allows young people to teach in underserved communities for two years. My social justice learnings from my women's studies major helped me secure that first job. It also gave me frameworks to understand the work I was doing.

I taught science classes to seventh and eighth graders in New York City for two years. I had the science background from being pre-med. It was a challenging and personally beneficial experience. Even 20 years later, I wish I could have done more for those students.

I hadn't planned to be a teacher my whole career. But after two years, I felt I hadn't done what I came to do. I wanted to be a better teacher and serve students well, which I didn't feel I could do in those first two years.

So, I moved to Chicago and taught for three more years at an all-girls charter school. It served 90% Black students, with the rest being white and Latina. I taught chemistry to 10th graders. It was an incredible experience to meet those students and make a difference in their lives.

However, I still felt teaching wasn't exactly what I wanted. What I liked most about teaching was the planning work. This involved looking at the scope of the school year, breaking it down into units and lessons, and thinking about assessment and reteaching.

With that knowledge about myself, I decided to go to public policy school. I wanted to use that planning mindset and frameworks to work on social issues I thought were important. I earned my MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School and moved back to LA.

For 12 years, I worked at the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). This organization supports charter schools in California to serve their students well and to be supported in advocacy. CCSA is mainly an advocacy organization that interfaces with local and state government on behalf of charter schools.

In advocacy, there are many ways to work. For me, I focused on local policy issues, helping charter schools interact with the local school district, like Los Angeles Unified. This ensured they received what they needed in their relationships with the district. That was my first role at CCSA.

The bulk of my time there was spent on elections. We opened a 501c4 organization, a sister organization to a nonprofit. A 501c4 can do political work, and donations to it are not tax-exempt. We had a political action committee with the C4 and ran independent expenditure campaigns.

This work aimed to get people who supported charter schools into elected office at the local and state levels. I did that for several years. Then, my last few years at CCSA were focused on bringing together all the advocacy work across the state. This included local, state, and legal advocacy.

The goal was to ensure everyone doing this work communicated well. It was a lot of internal alignment to make sure plans set in one area were supported by the rest of the organization.

I left CCSA in September and have been at the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools since then. In this new role, I am responsible for a smaller group of charter schools in LA working together.