Advisory Board
Jordan Meranus, Associate Partner
Jordan Meranus is an Associate Partner in the Newschools Venture Fund East Coast office where he focuses on investment strategy and management assistance to portfolio ventures in both the Charter Accelerator Fund and the Performance Accelerator Fund.
Jordan brings a wealth of experience in the education, nonprofit and private sectors. Prior to joining NewSchools, Jordan was a Managing Director at Imagitas, a company which partners with government agencies to demonstrate that entrepreneurial business ideas can help the public sector better serve citizens. At Imagitas , Jordan helped launch and lead MoversGuide Online, a collaborative, e-government business with the U.S. Postal Service that offers citizens the official Internet change of address application.
Jordan is also a co-founder of Jumpstart, a nonprofit organization built on a simple idea: that providing intensive early literacy services to low-income children is a great investment in ensuring that children in underserved communities enter school prepared to succeed. As a co-founder, Jordan helped develop Jumpstart's core service model, put in place the education program and evaluation process, and developed many of the original educational partnerships that endure today. Jumpstart is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on its approach to tracking outcomes and performance management. Jumpstart currently operates in over 30 cities nation-wide, working with more than 6,000 children in Head Start, and was selected by Worth Magazine as one of the top 100 non-profit organizations in the country.
Jordan serves on the Board of Trustees for the Excel Academy Charter School in East Boston and as an advisor to EdVestors, a philanthropic organization that funds academic-focused initiatives in public schools. Jordan received his bachelor's degree in history from Duke University and earned a master's degree in both Education and Public Administration from Harvard.
Aaron Lieberman
Founder and CEO, Aaron Lieberman previously founded and grew the national non-profit Jumpstart (www.jstart.org) into one of the leading educational non-profits in the country. Jumpstart is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on its approach to tracking outcomes and performance management. During Aaron's eight-year tenure as CEO at Jumpstart, the program grew from campus-based service program into a national organization and raised over $20 million dollars from the public and private sector. Jumpstart currently operates in over 30 cities nation-wide, working with more than 100 local Head Start programs, and was selected by Worth Magazine as one of the top 100 non-profit organizations in the country. While at Jumpstart, Aaron founded and served as Chairman of SchoolSuccess.net, an online, for-profit subsidiary of Jumpstart that raised over $2 million in venture capital and was later sold to Pearson Education. Today, SchoolSuccess is a growing part of Pearson's Early Education business and provides over 100,000 on-line education portfolios to clients ranging from local Head Start programs to Bright Horizons Children and Family Services. While founding Jumpstart, Aaron served as a lead teacher at the South End Head Start in Boston and received his Child Development Associate teaching credential.
Sara Dexter, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Education, University of Virginia
Dr. Dexter's research has focused on technology infusion and leading edge technologies in network-based assessment. She has taught a variety of courses on educational technology for preservice and in-service teachers. She has been the Project Director/PI for two PT3 grants. The first is Ed-U-Tech, a PT3 implementation grant as well as an outreach project for the U of MN that is a college-wide initiative affecting fifteen different initial licensure programs. This initiative improves the preparation of preservice teachers to use educational technology as a support to instruction through a content area specific approach. The eTIP Cases project is a PT3 Catalyst grant that is developing online, multimedia, context rich scenarios to deepen preservice teachers' decision-making skills about integrating and implementing technology. Dexter is also coPI for the Exemplary Technology-Supported-Schooling Case Studies Project. These case studies are of eleven U.S. K12 schools that employ educational technology to support school reform, innovative teaching practices, and increased student achievement; that project represents the US participation in two different international studies. In 2002 Dexter was elected to a two-year term as the Chair of the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group: Computer and Internet Applications in Education; she is a member of the editorial review board of the Journal of Educational Computing Research and Journal of Computing in Teacher Education.
Douglas E. Harris, Ph.D., Executive Director, Vermont Institutes
The Vermont Institutes is a non-profit organization providing professional development, assessment, program support, research, and evaluation. Dr. Harris has significant experience in developing standards-based curriculum, instruction, and assessment and is co-author of How to Use Standards in the Classroom (1998) Succeeding with Standards (2001), and Shared Journey (2003). Harris served for 23 years in the public schools as a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent. Since 1994, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Curriculum Renewal, working as a consultant and program evaluator with educators and policymakers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Harris has directed major funded projects for the National Gardening Association and the Vermont Institutes. He has been a member of ASCD's Executive Council, is a founding member of the ASCD Assessment Consortium, and is a frequent contributor to Vermont and national policy initiatives.
