NCSCvirtual Is Now Available On-Demand

Layla Avila serves as CEO/Executive Director of Education Leaders of Color. Along with Kaya Henderson and Aimée Eubanks Davis, Layla convened eighteen prominent African-American and Latino education leaders to discuss whether a new entity of education leaders of color was necessary to expand the faces, voices and emphases of education efforts and build the bridges needed to sustain and expand its success. This group became EdLoC’s Leadership Committee.

Previously, as Executive Vice President, Layla led TNTP’s efforts to broaden TNTP’s impact through strategic partnerships. She also served as Chief of Staff for CEO Dan Weisberg, and oversaw TNTP’s new business development and federal grant strategy, external research and evaluation, and organizational accountability. Layla also oversaw all of TNTP’s work to recruit and train new teachers where TNTP’s Teaching Fellows Programs pioneered new ways of preparing teachers to be effective in the classroom. Before that, as Vice President and Partner for TNTP’s Teaching Fellows programs, Layla managed the design and implementation of projects across the Southwest.

Layla started her career with Teach For America in 1997, working as a bilingual and ESL teacher at August A. Mayo Elementary School in Compton, CA, and serving on the school's Leadership Team. She also served as an analyst for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence For Hispanic Americans, an interagency working group to increase educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans.

Layla holds a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MA in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Layla was elected to the South Whittier School District Board of Trustees in 2005.

Cory Booker believes that the American dream isn’t real for anyone unless it’s within reach of everyone. Booker has dedicated his life to fighting for those who have been left out, left behind, or left without a voice.

Booker grew up in northern New Jersey and received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University. At Stanford, Booker played varsity football, volunteered for the campus peer counseling center, and wrote for the student newspaper. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to study at the University of Oxford, and then Yale Law School, where he graduated in 1997.

Instead of working for a corporate law firm, Booker moved to Newark after law school and started a nonprofit organization to provide legal services for low-income families, helping tenants take on slumlords. In 1998, Booker moved into the Brick Towers housing project in Newark, where he lived until its demolition in 2006. Booker still lives in Newark’s Central Ward today, where the median household income is less than $15,000.

At 29, Booker was elected to the Newark City Council, where he challenged the city’s entrenched political machine and fought to improve living conditions for city residents, increase public safety, and reduce crime.

Starting in 2006, Booker served as Newark’s mayor for more than seven years. During his tenure, the city entered its largest period of economic growth since the 1960s. In addition, overall crime declined and the quality of life for residents improved due to initiatives such as more affordable housing, new green spaces and parks, increased educational opportunities, and more efficient city services.

In October 2013, Booker won a special election to represent New Jersey in the United​ ​States Senate. In November 2014, Senator Booker was re-elected to a full six-year term.

As New Jersey’s junior Senator, Cory Booker has brought an innovative and consensus-building approach to tackling some of the most difficult problems facing New Jersey and our country. He has emerged as a national leader in the effort to fix our broken criminal justice system and end mass incarceration, helping craft the most sweeping set of criminal justice reforms in a generation, the First Step Act, which became law in December 2018.

Booker sits on the Judiciary Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Marc Brackett, is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a Professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by nearly 2,000 pre-K through high schools across the United States and in other countries. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

As a researcher for over 20 years, Brackett has focused on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and performance. He has published 125 scholarly articles and received numerous awards and accolades for his work in this area. He also consults regularly with corporations, such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating the principles of emotional intelligence into employee training and product design. Most recently, he co-founded Oji Life Lab, a corporate learning firm that develops innovative digital learning systems on emotional intelligence.

Brackett’s mission is to educate the world about the value of emotions and the skills associated with using them wisely. “I want everyone to become an emotion scientist”, he says. “We need to be curious explorers of our own and others’ emotions so they can help us achieve our goals and improve our lives.”

Jeb Bush is the 43rd governor of the State of Florida, serving from 1999 through 2007. He was the third Republican elected to the state’s highest office and the first Republican in the state’s history to be reelected. He was most recently a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

During his two terms, Governor Bush championed major reform of government, in areas ranging from health care and environmental protection to civil service and tax reform. His top priority was the overhaul of the state’s failing education system. Under Governor Bush’s leadership, Florida established a bold accountability system in public schools and created the most ambitious school choice programs in the nation. Today, Florida remains a national leader in education and is one of the only states in the nation to significantly narrow the achievement gap.

Governor Bush is also known for his leadership during two unprecedented back-to-back hurricane seasons, which brought eight hurricanes and four tropical storms to the state of Florida in less than two years. To protect the state from loss of life and damage caused by catastrophic events, such as hurricanes, Bush worked tirelessly to improve the state’s ability to respond quickly and compassionately during emergencies, while also instilling a ‘culture of preparedness’ in the state’s citizenry.

Governor Bush joined the University of Pennsylvania as a non-resident Presidential Professor of Practice for the 2018-19 academic year.  He has previously served as a visiting professor and fellow at Harvard University, an executive professor at Texas A&M University, and has been awarded several honorary doctorates from collegiate institutions across the country. Governor Bush has been recognized for his contributions to public policy by national organizations including the Manhattan Institute, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Jack Kemp Foundation. Governor Bush earned his bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Governor Bush maintains his passion for improving the quality of education for students across the country by serving as the Chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national nonprofit education reform organization he founded to transform education in America.

He has written three books, Profiles in Character; Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution; and Reply All: A Governor’s Story 1999-2007.

Governor Bush lives in Miami with his wife Columba. They have three children and four grandchildren

Stacey Childress is the CEO at NewSchools Venture Fund. A nationally recognized expert on philanthropy and innovation PreK-12 education, she joined NewSchools in 2014. Childress previously led the K-12 Next Generation Learning team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, investing in schools and technologies that enable better learning outcomes for middle and high school students in the United States. In 2012, she was named to the Forbes Impact 15 list, a group of innovators reimagining learning globally.

 Prior to joining Gates, Childress was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School where she wrote and taught about entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. Her work focused on urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit and for-profit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. During her time at Harvard she wrote three books and more than 30 cases and articles about education entrepreneurship.

Before working in academia, Childress co-founded an enterprise software company. She also spent 10 years in corporate sales and general management after working as a classroom teacher early in her career.

Dr. Michael M. Crow is an educator, knowledge enterprise architect, science and technology policy scholar and higher education leader. He became the sixteenth president of Arizona State University in July 2002 and has spearheaded ASU’s rapid and groundbreaking transformative evolution into one of the world’s best public metropolitan research universities. As a model “New American University,” ASU simultaneously demonstrates comprehensive excellence, inclusivity representative of the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the United States, and consequential societal impact.

Lauded as the ”#1 most innovative” school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, ASU is a student-centric, technology-enabled university focused on complex global challenges related to sustainability, economic competitiveness, social embeddedness, entrepreneurship and global engagement. Under Dr, Crow’s leadership, ASU has established twenty-four new transdisciplinary schools, including the School of Earth and Space Exploration, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and launched trailblazing multidisciplinary initiatives including the Biodesign Institute, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and important initiatives in the humanities and social sciences.