The New Teacher Project's 10-person leadership team brings to the organization over 100 years of collective experience in education and organizational management. Their experience as education policy experts, as executives, and as public school teachers guides them in shaping the organization's goals, services and strategy.

 

Ariela Rozman
Chief Executive Officer

Ariela Rozman began her tenure with The New Teacher Project (TNTP) in 2001 as Vice President of Marketing. Prior to becoming Chief Executive Officer in 2007, she served for four years as Vice President of Teaching Fellows Programs, growing TNTP’s largest business line to a staff of more than 60 individuals and overseeing the launch of 12 new programs in cities such as Chicago, New Orleans, and Oakland. Today, the Teaching Fellows Programs line supplies high-need school districts with approximately 3,000 high-quality teachers per year and accounts for over half of the organization’s revenue. Ariela also chaired TNTP’s Strategy Committee, a team comprised of TNTP’s senior leadership staff, for two years. Before joining The New Teacher Project, Ariela led the Online Marketing group for PlanetRx.com, which included managing the company's online new customer acquisition strategy, media buying and creative agency relationships, and large partnerships with companies such as AOL and Yahoo!. Ariela has also served as Special Assistant to the CEO at Muresco, a retail and manufacturing conglomerate in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and as a consultant at Bain & Co., a leading strategy consulting firm, working with Fortune 500 companies to improve their overall growth strategies and revenue opportunities. She holds a BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia.
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Timothy Daly
President

Timothy Daly is the President of The New Teacher Project (TNTP). Since his appointment in 2007, he has helped lead the organization’s efforts to end educational inequality by aligning policies and systems to better support teacher effectiveness. Prior to his appointment as President in 2007, Tim served as Vice President for Policy, helping to launch a team that published influential analyses of teacher equity issues in school districts such as Portland, Milwaukee, and New York. In 2009, he played an instrumental role in shaping the publication of The Widget Effect, a groundbreaking exploration of our failure to recognize or respond to the differences in teacher effectiveness. Tim has been with TNTP since 2001 and previously worked with teacher pipeline programs such as the NYC Teaching Fellows, which today has more than 9,000 active teachers in over 1,100 schools across New York City. Tim began his career in education as a Teach For America corps member at Northeast Middle School in Baltimore. He holds a BA in American Studies from Northwestern University and a MA in Teaching from Johns Hopkins University.
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Layla Avila
Vice President of Teaching Fellows Programs

As Vice President of Teaching Fellows Programs, Layla Avila oversees TNTP's largest business line and a growing staff of over 80 individuals. The Teaching Fellows Programs line supplies high-need school districts with roughly 3,000 high-quality teachers per year and accounts for approximately 60 percent of the organization's revenue. Prior to becoming Vice President, Layla served as a Partner for the business line, managing the implementation of existing and potential projects across the Southwest. Among her other accomplishments, Layla oversaw the design and implementation the Oakland Teaching Fellows, a teacher recruitment, training, and support program for the Oakland Unified School District, which resulted in the hiring of over 130 exceptionally talented teachers. Before joining The New Teacher Project, Layla worked as a bilingual and ESL teacher at August A. Mayo Elementary School in Compton, CA, where she also served as an English Language Development specialist on the school's Leadership Team. In addition, she served as an analyst for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence For Hispanic Americans, an interagency working group established by President Clinton to increase educational opportunities and achieve educational excellence for Hispanic Americans. In that role, she tracked federal legislation related to education and conducted research on issues affecting Hispanic education. Layla holds a BA in Economics from Columbia University and attained a Master's degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University before joining Teach For America in 1997. Layla was elected to the South Whittier School District Board of Trustees in November 2005. In 2008, she was one of 10 women honored by Maybelline and People en Espanol magazine with the “Beauty of Education” award, created to recognize outstanding individuals who are having a significant, positive impact on education in America.
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Karolyn Belcher
Vice President of Human Capital

Karolyn Belcher serves as The New Teacher Project's Vice President of Human Capital, overseeing the organization's efforts to recruit, select, and develop an exceptional staff of educational leaders. Karolyn began her career as a charter corps member of Teach For America, teaching science in New Orleans, Louisiana. After completing her two-year commitment, Karolyn joined the national staff of Teach For America, where she led its pre-service training institute in Houston, TX for over four years. Karolyn was one of the first employees of The New Teacher Project, working on contracts in Massachusetts, New York, and Philadelphia. She left the organization in 1999 to serve as the founding school director of the John A. Reisenbach Charter School, one of the first three charter schools in New York State. Located in central Harlem, the school served 405 students in grades K-8 by its fifth year of operation. Most recently, Karolyn served as an Instructor/Program Coordinator in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. In this role, she supervised students' administrative internships in public and private schools, taught a course on leadership skills, and coordinated all aspects of the degree programs administered by the Klingenstein Center for Independent School Education, the premier graduate program for aspiring independent and charter school leaders. Karolyn graduated from Mount Holyoke College with honors in Biological Science. She has a Master of Arts in Education Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University where she is continuing to work towards her doctorate. She currently is the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Explore Charter School in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which recently earned charter renewal and recognition by the Center for Education Reform as a 2007 National Charter School of the Year.
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Wendy Chang
Chief Financial Officer

As Chief Financial Officer, Wendy Chang oversees the planning, development and management of TNTP's financial functions including financial operations and reporting, internal controls and financial strategy. Wendy comes to TNTP with over 12 years experience in financial services, technology and media. Prior to joining TNTP, Wendy was a Senior Finance Manager at Google, where she led teams that focused on financial management, budgeting and financial analysis for YouTube and Google's Content efforts.  Previously, she held various positions at Morgan Stanley and Teleflora.  For the last 10 years, Wendy has been an active volunteer in working against domestic violence, and sits on the Board of the Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness.  Wendy earned her MBA from Columbia Business School, where she developed her interest in social enterprise, and her BA from Cornell University.

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Sarah Heine
Vice President of Training & Certification

As Vice President of Training & Certification, Sarah Heine oversees the design and implementation of TNTP’s teacher training and certification programs as well as the organization’s curricular products. Immediately prior to this role she served as Partner for the Texas Teaching Fellows, a statewide initiative that recruits, selects, trains and certifies high-quality teachers across four geographic regions in Texas.  Sarah also served as Director of Site Launch and Development and was responsible for establishing new Training and Certification program sites. In this role, she successfully registered TNTP as a teacher certification provider in the State of California.  She previously served as Program Director for TNTP’s contract with Mercy College (NY), where she was responsible for the creation, management and expansion of the New Teacher Residency program, a joint Mercy College/TNTP/NYC Department of Education program to develop effective urban teachers.  During her time in that role, more than 900 alternate route teachers earned their master’s degree and certification through the program. Sarah’s career with TNTP began in 2000 when she was Site Manager for the Kansas City Teaching Fellows.  Sarah was a Teach for America corps member who taught high school English in New Orleans. She holds a BA in English from Boston University.
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David Keeling
Vice President of Communications

As Vice President for Communications, David Keeling develops The New Teacher Project's identity and communications strategy, shapes its policy positioning and messaging, and advises over 25 project sites and urban school districts on communicating teacher quality-related policies and initiatives. His words have appeared in teacher recruitment ads in the New York City subway, in the pages of Education Week and The New York Times, and in the remarks and communications of some of the nation’s most prominent education leaders. David has also been integral to the publication of TNTP’s major policy reports. Most recently, he co-authored its 2009 study The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness, which earned widespread acclaim and shaped the U.S. Department of Education’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” reform initiative. David joined the organization in 2001 as Communications Manager for the NYC Teaching Fellows, the largest urban alternative certification program in the country, where he supervised communications with Teaching Fellows in 1,100 schools and nearly 20,000 annual applicants. He holds a BA in English from Middlebury College.
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Fiona Lin
Vice President of Research & Evaluation

As Vice President for Research & Evaluation, Fiona Lin spearheads TNTP’s evolving research agenda on teacher effectiveness and oversees the internal and external evaluations of all of TNTP’s programs and service models. Prior to joining the Research and Evaluation business line, Fiona served as founding Partner with TNTP’s Training and Certification line, where she managed a portfolio of contracts, including the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program (LPTP), which has certified more than 1,000 beginning teachers to date and is training over a quarter of all new teachers in post-Katrina New Orleans. Before joining TNTP in 2001, Fiona worked at the national offices of Teach For America, where she developed and piloted a performance assessment tool with beginning teachers in Newark Public Schools. Fiona joined the teaching profession as a Teach For America corps member, teaching middle school in Seattle Public Schools. She holds a Master's in Education from the University of Michigan and a BA in History from Yale University.
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Karla Oakley
Vice President of Teacher Quality Innovations

As Vice President for The New Teacher Project’s Teacher Quality Innovations line, Karla Oakley oversees the generation and execution of innovative pilot projects that further the organization’s commitment to sourcing, training, certifying and retaining highly effective teachers. Karla’s tenure with TNTP began in June of 2000 when she was hired as New York State Partner and charged with launching the NYC Teaching Fellows program, a contract with the New York City Department of Education that recruited and placed more than 1,500 teachers in hard-to-staff schools in its first two years. From 2003-2008, Karla served as TNTP’s Vice President of Training & Certification, overseeing the development and expansion of the Practitioner Teacher Program and all of TNTP’s instructional curriculum development. Prior to TNTP, Karla spent two years with Andersen Consulting in their Human Performance practice, working primarily in the financial services industry. Her career in education started with Teach For America, first as a corps member in the Mississippi Delta then on the national staff with roles in new teacher support and portfolio assessment. Karla holds a BS in Psychology from Duke University.
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Neel Sata
Vice President of Information Technology

As Vice President of Information Technology for The New Teacher Project, Neel Sata oversees technology direction and strategy, manages design and implementation of internal technology projects, and ensures IT alignment with the organization’s business priorities. Neel manages software development, internal and external infrastructure, datacenter operations, and technology vendor relationships. He has over 11 years of international consulting experience with a focus in the telecommunications, media, and high-tech industries.  Prior to joining TNTP, Neel was a Senior Manager at Accenture, where he led teams that focused on developing complex software applications that supported client business strategies and operations. In addition, Neel served four years on the Board of Directors for the Academy of Hope, which provides high-quality education and job skills training to low-income and at-risk adults in Washington, DC. He graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Victoria Van Cleef
Vice President of Staffing Initiatives

As Vice President of Staffing Initiatives for The New Teacher Project, Victoria is charged with growing this new business line. She oversees projects that focus on building school-level capacity to make effective hires and staffing chronically low-performing schools. In her previous role as Vice President of Business Development & Communications, she oversaw the establishment of TNTP's partnerships with school districts, state departments of education and other educational organizations, and managed the organization's marketing strategy and goals. Prior to joining The New Teacher Project, Victoria served as a consultant to the Stupski Foundation, identifying best practices to support whole district reform efforts, and as Senior Research Associate and Special Assistant to the Dean of New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, coordinating projects devoted to strengthening the teacher force in high-need districts. She has served as Special Assistant to the Chancellor for the New York City public schools under two administrations, working on both instructional and operational initiatives. Victoria has also worked in curriculum and product development for The Efficacy Institute, a national non-profit educational consulting firm. She holds a BA in Classical Civilizations from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Master's in Public Policy Analysis from New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the YWCA of Memphis, TN.
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Daniel Weisberg
Vice President of Policy & General Counsel

As Vice President of Policy & General Counsel, Daniel Weisberg leads The New Teacher Project's initiatives to align district, state and federal policies to the goal of providing quality teachers for poor and minority students. Prior to joining TNTP, Daniel served as Chief Executive of Labor Policy and Implementation for the New York City Department of Education. In this role, he led negotiations between the Department and the United Federation of Teachers that resulted in a series of groundbreaking reforms, including the city's highly-regarded "mutual consent" system, which gives teachers and schools the primary voice in school staffing. His distinguished record of policy achievements – including more rigorous tenure standards and principal and teacher bonus programs – has established him as a national leader on improving educational equality. Daniel brings to TNTP nearly 20 years of experience in labor and employment law. Before working for the New York City schools, he was a Partner in the New York office of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. Over the past two decades, he has been involved in several different programs mentoring and tutoring inner-city middle and high school students.  He holds a J.D. from New York University Law School and a BA in Political Science from Columbia College.

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