About TheBestSchools.org

While Henry is best known as the principal working with Jamie Escalante, the teacher portrayed in the film Stand and Deliver, he coauthored a book of his teaching principles (Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn’t Tell); has served as a commissioner for the National Commission on Drug Free Schools; has been a special consultant on the staff of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction of California; has served as principal at several high schools in California and Michigan; has been a motivational speaker and consultant throughout North America; managed a working ranch; and continues in his eighties to work as a tutor, substitute teacher, and court interpreter. Henry Gradillas holds a Doctorate in Education Specializing in Secondary Curriculum from Brigham Young University.

The educator excellence prize formerly offered by TheBestSchools.org, the Escalante–Gradillas Prize for Best in Education is named in Henry’s honor.

Lisa’s 30 years in education helped develop the champion spirit she brought to urban, K–8 Andrew Jackson School, part of the Philadelphia School District. Drawing from her studies at the Sorbonne in France and Philly’s own Temple University, Lisa worked in leadership positions within her district from 2001 through 2018. Her work spans the education spectrum from supervising district special ed programs to education technology and curriculum design.

Lisa founded Principal Solutions in 2018, providing training and educational consulting for academic and corporate organizations. Recent work includes collaboration with the San Diego Symphony, bringing music to area classrooms.

Read more about Lisa’s selection as winner of our 2015 Escalante–Gradillas Prize for Best in Education.

An educator of educators, from kindergarten to college, Mary brings a wealth of wisdom, including insider work as a public school teacher. As the director of the Institute for Education in Transformation at Claremont, Mary has been a pioneer in the scientific assessment of the classroom effectiveness of different teaching philosophies and styles. In the early 1990s, she headed a team that studied educational practices at four public schools in southern California for a year, culminating in the influential white paper Voices from the Inside: A Report on Schooling from Inside the Classroom. A decade later, she led a groundbreaking study of 31 highly effective teachers in low-performing urban schools in LA that unlocked the secrets of effective teaching.

Patrick J. O’Connor, Ph.D., is associate dean of college counseling at Cranbrook Kingswood School in metropolitan Detroit. A past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) and the Michigan ACAC, Patrick also teaches Counseling in the College Selection Process as both a graduate class and a professional development program. In 2017–18, he served as the inaugural School Counselor Ambassador Fellow with the US Department of Education, keeping the Department informed of current trends and issues of interest to school counselors. O’Connor is the author of College is Yours 2.0 (Outskirts Press, 2011) and College Counseling for School Counselors (Outskirts Press, 2105). He also writes regularly for High School Counselor Week and Admissions Intelligence, with other work appearing in the Washington Post, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. He is on the board of directors for the Michigan College Access Network, was the co-founder and serves as co-editor of the Journal of College Access, and has recently served on the board of Common Application and the credentialing commission for the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners. A member of the Political Science Faculty at Oakland Community College, O’Connor is a recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Award from Oakland Community College, the Margaret Addis Service to NACAC Award, NACAC’s Government Relations Award, and the William Gramenz Award (for outstanding contributions to college counseling in Michigan). He holds five college degrees, including a Ph.D. in Education Administration. O’Connor is the first member of his family to graduate from college.

Among Anthony’s many math teaching accomplishments includes a 4.96 average student score on the grueling AP Calculus test, which 100% of his students passed, including one who achieved an unheard-of perfect score. Due to these successes, he received a White House Science Fair invitation and recognition, and he was the 2016 Los Angeles Unified School District Teacher of the Year and the Harvard Club of Southern California Educator of the Year. An immigrant to the U.S., who grew up in the inner city, Anthony identified with his students and achieved these remarkable results in a school with a 91% poverty rate.

In 2016, Anthony won our Escalante–Gradillas Prize for Best in Education. Amazingly, just two years later, Anthony became assistant principal of James A. Garfield Senior High School in Los Angeles, the very school where Jaime Escalante and Henry Gradillas worked together to change the educational futures of so many students for the better. Talk about a storybook outcome!

Travis has a BA in Communications and has spent a decade partnering with high schools, colleges, and universities to spread the word about their school and recruit more students. In addition, he has worked on websites that help people make informed decisions about degree programs and schools. From copywriting and editing, to sales and account management, to overseeing business development and operations, Travis maintains a wide set of skills. He now focuses effort on keeping TheBestSchools.org a top educational resource.

When he’s not working, Travis is joyfully consumed by his more important jobs: being a father to his three boys, a husband to his amazing wife, and a follower of Christ. One day, he thinks he may even have time for some hobbies.

Prior to coming to TheBestSchools.org, Cliff was Special Partnerships Manager for EducationAxis. He has also worked in sales and marketing for a number of other companies. He co-founded Fontes Press, an academic and theological publishing company. Cliff has a BA in ancient Greek and Hebrew and is pursuing further graduate studies. He resides in the state of Washington with his wife and daughter, and he may be the only Pittsburgh Penguins fan in the state.

Bobby has earned both an MA in Philosophy and an MA in English from the University of Louisville. His interests are wide ranging, and he works and researches with the constant desire to expand his knowledge base and, in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, avoid over-specialization in favor of expert generalism.

David is an author and journalist who has written extensively on music and education. Tomar catapulted to notoriety with his controversial and eye-opening 2010 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled The Shadow Scholar. Writing under the pseudonym Ed Dante (a name now committed to perpetuity by its own Wikipedia entry), Tomar highlighted his decade-long career as an academic ghostwriter while simultaneously announcing his retirement from the business.

The Shadow Scholar became the most read article in the history of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Although student cheating is nothing new, this article underscored the extent to which student cheating had become a business, in which students paid others to do their work, sometimes for an entire course. Tomar’s revelations led to appearances on ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, and the Today Show. There he shared the ghostwriting business’s trade secrets and attempted to bring greater awareness to this hidden epidemic of student cheating.

Since then, Tomar has focused not just on exposing the broader failures in American education but also on reforming it. Through his full-length 2012 memoir, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (Bloomsbury USA), his consulting work for the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), and his editorial seat at TheBestSchools.org, Tomar is seeking to narrow the gap between the promise of education and its (often dismal) reality.

Tomar has written for The New York Times and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post as well as editor-in-chief of music blog The Liner Note.