Key Collaborators
CEO
Judy Codding was the President of a professional learning company, TeacherCraft, focused on improving the knowledge and skills of teachers. She was Managing Director, Pearson PLC, System of Courses, a digital, comprehensive, internationally benchmarked solution to support teachers and promote high achievement for all K-12 students in mathematics and English language arts and is benchmarked to the Common Core State Standards and college readiness expectations. The courses constitute the digital equivalent of 28 textbooks.
Before Pearson acquired America’s Choice, Dr. Codding was its President and Chief Executive Officer. America’s Choice offered one of the nation’s leading comprehensive school designs and has a highly regarded instructional system. Since its inception, America’s Choice worked in close partnership with states and districts helping schools raise the academic performance of their students. She is the former Vice President for Programs and Chief Operating Officer for the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington DC think tank where she did research in twenty-three countries.
Before joining NCEE, Dr. Codding was an award-winning principal of Pasadena High School, a large urban comprehensive high school serving predominately low-income African American and Latino students. Previously, Dr. Codding had been a teacher and principal at Bronxville High School and Scarsdale High School in New York. Dr. Codding was a charter principal of the Coalition of Essential Schools. She was an Associate in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She served as an education consultant to the Ministry of Education in the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. Department of Defense schools and keynoted many major education conferences. She served as a commissioner on the California Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards. Dr. Codding is co-author with Marc Tucker of Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them; with David Marsh of The New American High School; and with Marc Tucker of The Principal Challenge. She has written numerous articles.
Dr. Codding serves on several not-for-profit education boards and is a director of a public company.
Visionary Team
Sherry King, Ed.D., has been a leader of educational reform, at the intersection of theory and practice, for 50 years. She has been a teacher, principal, and superintendent of schools. She has led the implementation of national school improvement initiatives, and headed national curriculum and professional development efforts. Dr. King was an early adopter of technology, working with the Center for Children and Technology and as an early partner with Wireless Generation, which became Amplify. She later led the development of English Language Arts curriculum and oversaw field trials and professional development for the digitally published Pearson System of Courses. Her current work with TeacherCraft and School in the Square Public Charter continues her commitment to ensuring that curriculum and professional development is closely tied to what teachers and students actually need and experience.
Marge Cappo is a respected innovator in technology-based curriculum. As founder and president of Learning in Motion, she has managed the development of innovative products such as the Pearson System of Courses, a tablet-based K–11 math and K–12 English language arts curriculum that aligns with the Common Core State Standards and Twig K-6 Science curriculum.
Marge also founded Wings for Learning, an educational technology company, and founded the microcomputer division at Sunburst Communications, an educational publisher. At both companies, she managed development, marketing, operations, and finance. She started her career as a high school math teacher and the Director of Development for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium.
Marge’s dedication to the research and development of products that utilize current advances in technology and educational theory has been well-documented by past successes. She has designed over 50 award-winning programs, one of which received a “Program of the Decade” award from Classroom Computer Learning. She was named “Educator of the Decade” in 1990 by Electronic Learning Magazine and was recognized as one of a handful of “Pioneers in Education” by National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in 1999.
Phil Daro is the award winning (the Ross Taylor/Glenn Gilbert National Leadership Award and the Walter Denham Award) mathematics educator, Phil Daro, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. He consults on mathematics education with school districts, states, and organizations. His work focuses on the design and implementation tools for improving mathematics instruction and assessment, and professional learning at every level of the educational system. He serves on various non-profit Boards and advisory bodies including the NAEP Validity Panel for the national test, the Education Development Center, the Strategic Education Research Partnership and others. He has directed large scale professional learning programs, curriculum development projects including Pearson System Of Courses and assessment programs in school mathematics. This work included directing the California Mathematics Project at the U. of California and the mathematics programs of America’s Choice, TeacherCraft and SERP.
Larry Molinaro is Senior Advisor, NCEE, with a focus on AI in education and OECD’s High-Performing Systems of Tomorrow project. Prior to this appointment, Larry served as Director, Development & Evaluation (NCEE) and Director, Curriculum & Operations (NISL). In those roles, Larry oversaw research into leadership practices across a variety of sectors as well as the development of content and delivery models supporting NCEE’s executive development programs. These efforts included a complete redesign of the NISL program in 2016. Larry joined NCEE in 2002 as the director of the National College for the America’s Choice School Design (ACSD) program, where he oversaw professional development, delivery methods and tools, and certification processes. From 2010 to 2013, Larry helped integrate the ACSD into Pearson upon its acquisition and subsequently, as Senior Vice President, Programs for Pearson Education, he managed the development of 15 full-year mathematics courses as part of the all-digital Pearson System of Courses.
Before joining NCEE, Larry developed corporate university programs as Global Director, Learning & Development, for James Martin & Company, an international technology consulting company (now GenPact), and as a training manager at the American Red Cross. At James Martin & Company, Larry restructured the company’s global corporate learning function to support its $200M redesign from a classic consulting model to an agile change leadership model within its offices across three geographies (Asia/Pacific Rim, North America, Europe). Earlier in his career, Larry was a researcher at Thomas Jefferson University (Jefferson Institute of Molecular Medicine), Philadelphia, PA and Yale University (School of Medicine), New Haven, CT on studies related to the structure and function of proteoglycans within extracellular matrix and the central nervous system. He also served as a chemist for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals with an emphasis on the development of biochemical analytical methods.
Larry Molinaro holds an MBA in global leadership and management from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and a BSc in biochemistry from Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.