Teach For America alumnus, Jason Kloth named Deputy Mayor of Education in Indianapolis

Great news from Indianapolis from Patrick O'Donnell:

 

I wanted to put on your radar that Teach For America alumnus, Jason Kloth, was named the first ever Deputy Mayor of Education in Indianapolis. Jason was the founding executive director of Teach For America – Indianapolis and later went on to serve as Teach For America's Senior Vice President of Public Affairs where he managed TFA's government affairs, communications, research and evaluation, federal policy, and community relations teams.

This guy is the truth. We've been been friends and colleagues since we both worked on Teach For America's recruitment team. He's actually a major reason why I moved to Indianapolis when he recruited me to take over as the TFA ED in Indy. In your words, he is an education warrior. He has an absolute conviction about what's possible in education, which is rooted in his personal experience as a corps member in the Rio Grande Valley where he was named Teacher of the Year by his colleagues. He has an incredible ability to set a clear and compelling vision for success-- he launched the Indianapolis Principal Fellowship in Indy which is a principal recruitment and pipeline program that has since enabled us to recruit more than a dozen phenomenal TFA alums to move to Indy to become school leaders. His skill at managing teams to achieve ambitious outcomes in unparalleled. And he has an uncanny ability to recruit talent from across the country. He recruited me, Dale Chu who is the Assistant Superintendent at the Indiana Department of Education, and Emily Pelino who is the ED of KIPP here (both of these folks are also ed warriors who should be on your radar). No doubt he'll continue to recruit many more great leaders to Indy now that he's Deputy Mayor.

Not sure how much you know about what's happening in Indy, but this city can seriously be the proof point. And what we've needed is a central figure who can set a city-wide strategy for transformation. Jason is the guy.

Here's the official press release as well as J.K. Wall's article that ran in the IBJ and Scott Elliott's article in the IndyStar.

 

PS-- Jason was the KIPP: Indy board chair a few years back who reconstituted the entire board and staff, brought in Emily Pelino and Aleesia Johnson as the school leaders, and brought in 2/3 of the teachers (over 80% of staff is now TFA CMs/alums actually). The school has since had some of the most significant student achievement growth in the state and is poised to expand with a great executive director. All of this wouldn't have happened without Jason. Great stuff!

 

PS—My email about my visit to KIPP Indianapolis in Dec. 2009 is here: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2009/12/lessons-from-my-visit-to-kipp.html