Home: Houston, TX. Profession: Education reform and workforce development. Organization: Texas School Venture Fund / Career For All / WorkTexas. Title: President and Co-Founder, Texas School Venture Fund. Alma mater: University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1991); National-Louis University (M.Ed., 2005); honorary doctorates from Yale University (2010) and Duke University (2015). Languages spoken: English and Spanish.
Current project: Expanding WorkTexas—a Houston-based nonprofit trade training program—and building Career For All, which supports tuition-free pre-K through high school options and vocational training across underserved Houston neighborhoods. What’s been your big (or biggest) leap? Pivoting from college prep (which we made successful for 50 percent of our students) to vocational prep in order to work on the other half. Latest contribution to others: WorkTexas served more than 430 adults and high school students in 2024–25, with 88 percent of adult participants completing training and employed graduates averaging $27 per hour after one year on the job. Last book read: Sneetches and On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss—still the best two-book combination on treating people well and staying open to ideas nobody else has thought of yet. Hobbies: AAU basketball. My daughter is a great point guard and I’m a big fan.
Personality profile: Competitive, direct, hands-on and restless. Moral compass: Work hard. Be nice.—the same two values I tried to teach in a fifth-grade classroom in Houston and haven't found a reason to improve on since. What is your greatest joy? Watching someone who was written off—by a school, a system or their own circumstances—land a job, keep it and start building something real for their family. What occupation, other than your own, do you most admire? Skilled tradespeople. Electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters and HVAC technicians keep every building in this country running. They're chronically undervalued and in short supply, which is exactly the problem WorkTexas is trying to fix. How do you define an ideal business relationship? Shared accountability for outcomes, not just shared credit for effort. What word or phrase do you use far too often? Show up. Be on time. The best ability is availability.
What was your first paying job? Baskin Robbins in 1985. The more consequential early experience was serving as a volunteer camp counselor in Israel in 1991 with Ethiopian Jewish families airlifted out during the civil war. What book have you repeatedly read? Sneetches and On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss. One teaches you how to treat people. The other teaches you to keep looking for good ideas, past what everyone else thinks is the last letter of the alphabet. Besides your parents, who has had the greatest influence on your life? The master teachers I watched in my first years in the classroom. I was a poor teacher when I started, and the people who showed me what excellent actually looked like changed the entire direction of my career. What’s the best advice you received in your career? Trust your gut and keep your legs turning. What is your go-to source of news and information? Colleagues, friends and family. What personal circumstance has had the greatest influence on your life? Watching my first class of fifth graders fall apart the following year—failing, dropping out and becoming parents too early—while I was still in my second year of teaching. That's when the work stopped being a job and started being a calling and a mission.
What is your big idea?
Career For All. Not college for all—career for all. Every young person deserves a post-secondary path that sets them up for financial independence, whether that runs through a university, a trade certification or both.
What change are you working on to effect in your profession or field? Building a workforce training model that is accountable to outcomes, not certificates. Most programs measure success by graduation rates. We measure it by whether people are still employed, advancing and earning more five years after they finish. What change would you like to see in the world? An education system that treats a skilled trade as a legitimate first choice—not a fallback—and prepares students for work alongside preparing them for college. What widely held belief do you reject? That a four-year degree is the only reliable path to a successful career. About 70 percent of American adults do not hold a college degree. They all need post-secondary skills. The system has been slow to acknowledge that. What mega-trend most excites you? Employers taking a direct role in shaping training curriculum. When a company tells us how many people they can hire and what those people need to know, we can build a program worth attending. That's the model WorkTexas was built on.
As a kid, what did you first want to be when you grew up? No idea. That's more or less why I ended up in Sen. Paul Simon's Washington office after college, waiting to figure it out—and then Teach For America answered the question for me. What advice would you give your younger self? Trust your gut and keep your legs turning. Also: find the best people in the room, watch what they do and ask them everything. What period in your life would you do differently, if you could? The years when KIPP was pushing college for all without asking hard enough questions about what came after. We helped a generation of students get to college. We didn't do enough to help them finish—or to acknowledge that college wasn't the right path for all of them. Who would you like to spend an evening with, in heaven? Walter Payton, the greatest football player ever.
Personal mission: To make sure that every young person in an underserved community has access to a school—and a path to a career—worth choosing. Personal motto: Work hard. Be nice. Favorite quote: "Pain can't stop a pro" (Mike Ditka).
