Staff Leadership
 
Tom Carroll Tom Carroll is the President of the foundation for Education Reform & Accountability.  Mr. Carroll also is Chairman of the Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls and the Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys. These companion schools, which are targeting at-risk students, are the first public elementary schools in the nation to provide expert teachers for each major academic subject, and offer students a money-backed Learning Guarantee tied to student results on state exams.  
     Mr. Carroll serves as Chairman of A Brighter Choice Scholarships, an innovative privately funded initiative that provides scholarships for inner-city children to attend the private school of their choice.  
     Mr. Carroll previously held research, fiscal, and administrative positions in New York with the Governor's office, the State Legislature, and the State Division of the Budget. 
     Mr. Carroll also is a member of the board of advisors for the Washington D.C. based Center for Education Reform and the Graduate Management Institute of Union College in Schenectady, NY.
Brian Backstrom

Brian Backstrom is Vice President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability. Mr. Backstrom researches and writes on a variety of topics, including: charter schools, vouchers, education tax credits, and other school choice reforms; replication of "best-practices" curricular models, the implementation of creative school designs, and other innovative educational practices; and, the use and meaningfulness of standardized testing, comparisons of student performance, and other issues surrounding educational accountability.
   Mr. Backstrom previously served as the Vice President for the Empire Foundation for Policy Research, a public policy think tank based in Albany, New York, that focused on state economic issues. Mr. Backstrom also has served as the Manager of Regulatory Policy & Operations in the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform, as the Director of Research for the New York State Legislative Commission on Public-Private Cooperation, and as an analyst in the governor's Division of the Budget. Mr. Backstrom also has served as the Chief Executive Officer of the A Brighter Choice Scholarships program in the Capital District, and sits on the board of trustees of the New York Charter School Resource Center.
   Mr. Backstrom, a Minnesota native, graduated cum laude from the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, with a B.A. in Political Science and a M.S. in Public Policy Analysis. He lives with his wife and two children in the village of Valley Falls in Rensselaer County.
Jason Brooks
B. Jason Brooks is the Director of Research and Communications at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability. Mr. Brooks conducts research on a wide array of education policy issues, including the performance of public schools, innovations employed by charter schools, strategies used to raise academic achievement of disadvantaged student populations, and the implementation in New York State of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
    Mr. Brooks previously worked at the Empire Foundation for Policy Research, conducting research on a wide array of public policy areas including state tax and budget issues, debt reform, economic trends, and education reform. Among the projects on which he worked were monitoring the implementation of the public university system’s new core curriculum and spearheading a critique of the state’s high-school American history curriculum.
    Mr. Brooks is a graduate of Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
    Mr. Brooks is a former member of the Advisory Board of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education, and is on the boards of the national Syracuse University Alumni Association and the Alumni Club of the Capital District, where he served as the organization’s president from 2002 to 2005. Mr. Brooks resides in Saratoga Springs.
Andrea Rogers Andrea Rogers is the Research Associate at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability. Ms. Rogers researches and writes on a variety of education policy issues, including reforms initiated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the state's student performance assessment system, charter schools, and other education policy areas.
   Ms. Rogers previously worked as a policy analyst at the U.S. General Accounting Office in Washington D.C., focusing her research on tax policy and community development issues. At GAO, Ms. Rogers was involved in, among other things, survey analysis, tracking the use of federal expenditures, and performing congressional briefings.
   Ms. Rogers graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University at Buffalo with a degree in Anthropology, and earned a Master of Arts in Public Policy from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany. Ms. Rogers was a member of the Development Committee for the Rockefeller College Review, a student working papers series, served as an officer of the college's graduate student association, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, a group with which she is still active.


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