Maria is a former education researcher. She studied the impacts of educational programs and policies at Abt Associates, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), and the Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE). She then took this learning into the field as a 4th- and 5th-grade teacher at an elementary school in Dorchester. She currently serves as the Vice President of Institutional and Public Funding for The Possible Zone.
This study examines the experiences of fifteen elementary schools in Washington State demonstrating relatively slow improvement on the reading and math sections of the WASL.