Team
Monisha Lozier is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. She leads Bellwether’s talent practice, through which she blends her passion for the education community with over 10 years of executive search and recruitment experience.
Prior to launching Bellwether, Ms. Lozier was the founder of her own small business, Cobbe Place Consulting. In this capacity, she and her team conducted executive-level searches for dozens of reform-oriented organizations in the K-12 education community.
Before starting her own practice, she was a managing consultant in AT Kearney’s education executive search practice where she specialized in senior-level searches for leaders of institutions of higher education, education-related associations and nonprofits, and for-profit education companies. Prior to joining AT Kearney, she was an associate, senior associate, and ultimately the first-ever client partner in Korn/Ferry International’s education practice.
Ms. Lozier holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University where she focused on organizational behavior, strategy, and nonprofit management. She earned a B.A. in political science from Connecticut College. She and her husband reside in Chicago with their two daughters.
monisha@bellwethereducation.org
Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Rotherham leads Bellwether’s thought leadership, idea generation, and policy analysis work. He also writes a weekly column on education for TIME.com as well as the blog Eduwonk.com and is co-publisher of “Education Insider” a federal policy research tool produced by Whiteboard Advisors. Rotherham previously served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Clinton administration and is a former member of the Virginia Board of Education. In addition to Bellwether, Rotherham has founded or co-founded two other influential education reform organizations including Education Sector and served on the boards of several other successful education start-ups.
Rotherham is the author or co-author of more than 125 articles, book chapters, papers, and op-eds about education policy and politics and is the author or editor of four books on education policy. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Reinventing Public Education and also at the PostPartisan Foundation. He serves on advisory boards and committees for a variety of organizations including The Broad Foundation, Education Pioneers, and the National Governors Association. He is on the board of directors for the Indianapolis Mind Trust and the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and serves on the Visiting Committee for the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Rotherham believes dramatic improvements in America’s education system are integral to ensuring equality of opportunity and building a more equitable and just society.
He lives in Virginia with his wife and two daughters.
Kim Smith is co-founder and CEO of Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. She is widely recognized as an innovative and entrepreneurial leader in education, and was featured in Newsweek’s report on the “Women of the 21st Century” as “the kind of woman who will shape America’s new century.” After serving as a founding team member at Teach For America, she went on to found and lead an AmeriCorps program for community-based leaders in education as well as a business start-up and worked in marketing for online learning. After completing her M.B.A. at Stanford University, she co-founded and led NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm focused on transforming public education, where she helped to create a new, bipartisan, cross-sector community of entrepreneurial change agents.
Ms. Smith has helped to incubate numerous education and social change organizations and has served on a range of boards, which currently include those of NewSchools, Education Sector, and Giving Assets. She has authored a number of publications about the entrepreneurial education landscape, including “What Is Educational Entrepreneurship?” in Education Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities, “Social Purpose Capital Markets in K–12” in The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship: Possibilities for School Reform, “Creating Responsive Supply in Education” in More Than Just Schools: Rethinking the Demand for Educational Entrepreneurship and “Innovation in Education: Problems and Opportunities.” She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
Mary K. Wells is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Prior to co-founding Bellwether, she established an independent consulting practice serving education reform organizations with a focus on growth strategy, partnership opportunities, business planning, organizational development, and implementation planning. Recent clients include the Denver School of Science and Technology, Teach Plus, YES Prep Public Schools, and the New Teacher Project.
Ms. Wells has worked as a private sector consultant, an investor, and a nonprofit executive. From 2005 to 2007, she designed, launched, and managed the Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (T-STEM) Initiative for the Texas High School Project. T-STEM is a $71 million initiative to improve the quality of math and science education in Texas and to expand the pipeline of highly skilled employees qualified for careers in the economy of the 21st century. She also managed the New Schools portfolio for the Texas High School Project, which included investments in high-performing charter schools and school developers.
Ms. Wells brings extensive experience from the private sector. She was a manager and consultant with Bain & Company, where she worked primarily with Fortune 500 companies on growth strategy, new business development, and post-merger integration issues. She was with Bain & Company for over seven years. During that time, she advised Boston Public Schools on the creation and implementation of small learning communities within their comprehensive high schools on a pro bono basis. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.
Sara Mead is a senior associate partner with Bellwether Education Partners, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. She focuses on thought leadership as well as strategic advising at Bellwether. Her work on federal education policy, charter schools, preschool, and gender in education has been featured in numerous media outlets including The Washington Post, New York Times, and USA Today, and she has appeared on CBS and ABC News and on NPR. Before joining Bellwether, she directed the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative. She has also worked for Education Sector, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education. She serves on the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, which authorizes charter schools in the District of Columbia and holds them accountable for results, and on the board of Democrats for Education Reform. The daughter, granddaughter, and sister of public school educators, she holds a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Vanderbilt University.