OUR TEAM
Maya Angelou Public Charter School Board of Directors
Alise Marshall, Board Chair
Alise joined the Public Welfare Foundation as Director of Strategy and New Ventures in 2018 to identify new levers for impact and build cross-sector collaborations for social change. Alise has dedicated her career to advocating for the opportunity for people in need and leading system reform for transformative change. Prior to joining Public Welfare, Alise served as Senior Manager for Economic Opportunity at Walmart Foundation where she oversaw the Foundation’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion portfolio, among others.
In that role she led the strategic design and management of a combined $10 million philanthropic portfolio dedicated to accelerating impact for new majority communities (people of color, the LGBTQIA community, individuals with disabilities, and women and girls).
Prior to joining Walmart Foundation, Marshall spent six years in the Obama administration. She last served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Office of the Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education where she managed the development of the Department’s strategic plan and led efforts to create transformative impact in low/moderate income communities. Marshall was on the launch team for the President’s My Brother’s Keeper Federal Task Force and managed its policy apparatus, designing solutions to expand access to opportunity for and address barriers experienced by boys and young men of color. She also led the administration’s Rethink Discipline effort to encourage more effective policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and served on the Second Chance Pell selection committee providing Pell Grants to incarcerated students.
Alise is a native of Shelbyville, KY and received her B.A. from the University of Kentucky.
Previously, Michael was a member of the U.S. Real Estate acquisitions team at the Carlyle Group, and was previously an analyst at Lazard Freres & Co, where he focused on mergers and acquisitions within the real estate group in New York. Michael attended Princeton University, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Thomas White, Board Secretary
Tom is a practiced corporate and bankruptcy law at WilmerHale from 1983 to 2017, where he was one of the firm’s leading practitioners in the area of corporate governance and disclosure, with extensive experience representing corporate and institutional clients in complex business transactions. Mr. White also served as General Counsel of the firm for nine years. He retired in 2017.
Mr. White has particular experience in legal aspects of accounting and auditing. He currently serves as a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC). He founded Focus on Audit Committees, Accounting and the Law, a WilmerHale blog that provides a legal perspective on developments in accounting standards, financial reporting, auditing and regulation of the accounting profession. As General Counsel of WilmerHale, Mr. White advised internal and external clients on professional responsibility and legal practice issues.
Since retiring from WilmerHale, Mr. White’s focus has been teaching activities. Beginning in September 2018, he will be a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, where he will teach a course on “Governance of Financial Reporting.” In January 2018, under the auspices of the ABA Rule of Law Initiative, he taught a course on Accounting for Lawyers to a class of 26 female law students and recent law graduates at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He also led the Washington office of the National Council of Teachers of English, securing authorization and funding of a comprehensive federal literacy program; directed large scale projects and multidisciplinary teams across multiple organizations and government agencies focused on education policy, technology, assessment, and professional learning for the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, Intel Education, EDUCAUSE, and the American Association for Higher Education; and taught higher education and integrative studies at George Mason University.
He has served on the Technical Advisory Board of IMS Global, third country representative for the Europortfolio project, and founding board chair of the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning. He currently serves on the board of the Maya Angelou Schools. A keynote speaker at national and international conferences in eight countries on four continents, he has authored, edited, or produced more than 35 research and policy publications, including award-winning books, reports, interactive web sites, and video collections. He won the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Faculty Prize for Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment in 2012.
The Maya Angelou Academy’s success has been widely recognized. Students at Maya Angelou improve their reading and math scores at an annualized rate of nearly 1.5 grade levels. Over 50% of the students who earn a GED or high school diploma while at the Academy go on to postsecondary school—a rate nearly unheard of in youth correctional settings. Retention rates (the percentage of students remaining in school or holding jobs after release to the community) have doubled since the Maya Angelou Academy began serving D.C.’s incarcerated youth. The changes at the school have been termed “remarkable” by a national expert and court-appointed monitor. David left the Maya Angelou Academy in the fall of 2011 to start the Center for Educational Excellence in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Lewis served as intern for the Hon. Maurice A. Ross of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He received the following degrees: The George Washington University Law School JD in 2008 and from the University of Tennessee BS, cum laude, Finance, 2004.
Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011, when he joined the Yale faculty. At Yale, he teaches Constitutional Law, a seminar called Race, Class and Punishment, and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men incarcerated in a Connecticut prison. Professor Forman teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions.
Dr. Johnson is a long-time board member and former board chair for Maya Angelou Schools and an advisor to CampusESP, an ed-tech startup that engages parents to support college student success. She has served as a professorial lecturer in education at The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development and a community college adjunct instructor at the UDC Community College. She received her Ed.D. in Educational Policy from The George Washington University, Ed.M. in Higher Education from Harvard University, and B.A. in English from Azusa Pacific University.
Reginald Belle
Campaigns and Programs Fellow
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
She served as Counselor and Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton during her whole tenure as United States Secretary of State. After leaving the State Department in January, 2013, she founded BlackIvy Group, which builds businesses in Africa.