Andrea Kleinbard is a passionate educator whose entire career has been devoted to improving the educational outcomes for historically underserved children. With APK Literacy, Andrea has the pleasure of partnering with a diverse set of organizations. Her work with APK Literacy has included the design of principal and superintendent training sessions on language comprehension - including knowledge- and vocabulary-building instruction, language structures, and text complexity, word recognition instruction, curriculum and assessment program design, and data-driven leadership; evaluation and written reports on school networks’ current literacy programs and systems; and ongoing coaching and advising relationships. In addition to supporting public school network leaders and non-profit leaders, she also partners with philanthropic foundations seeking support in learning more about the science of reading and in designing programs that will impact life opportunities for children experiencing poverty via improved reading instruction. Andrea deeply enjoys her work and is so grateful to partner with so many hard-working and equity-minded leaders.
Prior to her APK Literacy work, Andrea joined her former superintendent as one of the founding team members of Lit, an organization which helps school and system leaders build, implement, and sustain reading ecosystems that live at the intersection of research and instructional equity. During her time at Lit, Andrea piloted the organization’s partnerships with elementary schools across several states, including New York, Louisiana, Texas, Maryland, Colorado, California, and designed and led training sessions for school and network leaders across several other states. Through Lit, Andrea taught sessions to over 200 aspiring and veteran principals and superintendents in the National Principal Academy Fellowship program. Her first session on Foundational Skills: Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Print Concepts and Fluency, was at the time, the highest-rated content-based session in NPAF’s history. Concurrently with her time at Lit, Andrea served as an Expert with Understood, an organization empowering people with learning and thinking differences, leading training sessions on the science of reading at conferences including the All Means All convening.
Prior to Lit, Andrea spent 10 years with Uncommon Schools. During her last few years with Uncommon, her work included designing and leading training sessions for teachers and school leaders in groups of 40-400, coaching founding and veteran principals across all fields within their leadership, designing the literacy programming for K-2 across all 19 network elementary schools, and writing the phonics and phonemic awareness training programs for all K-2 teachers throughout the network.
While serving as kindergarten teacher in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Andrea led her students to outstanding achievement in literacy and math; each year, 100% of her 30 kindergarten students finished the year reading fluently, at or above grade level. Her students of color and students experiencing poverty out-performed white and affluent students in the suburbs across multiple metrics in both math and reading. Known for the rigor and joy within her classroom, Andrea’s teaching was filmed by several organizations, including Uncommon Schools; Teach Like a Champion; Great Habits, Great Readers; and Relay Graduate School of Education, for use in training teachers, principals and graduate students across the country.
While still in the classroom, Andrea served as the instructional coach of dozens of new and veteran teachers across elementary grades, leading to significant gains in the student achievement of the teachers in her care. Later, as Dean of Curriculum and Instruction, she was charged with turning around the early elementary program of one of then then lowest-performing schools in the network, which Andrea did within three years, resulting in her diligently built kindergarten, first grade and second grade teams of teachers becoming some of the top-performing teachers in the network. During this time, Andrea also served a graduate school instructor for students enrolled at Relay Graduate School of Education and was highly rated for her ability to build supportive coaching relationships, lead engaging sessions, and provide impactful feedback.
The prelude to Andrea’s career took place as Dartmouth College Linguistics Department’s Teaching Assistant, teaching and supporting undergraduate students early in their journeys exploring phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, while still an undergraduate herself. Upon graduation, Andrea became a corps member with Teach for America in New York City, training in a bilingual third grade classroom at P.S. 86 in the Bronx. She received her masters degree from Relay Graduate School of Education via Hunter College. She received her masters degree “with distinction” based on the outstanding student achievement within her classroom.