Executive Vice President

Matt Gandal joined Achieve in 1997, shortly after governors and business leaders created the organization. He opened the organization's Washington, D.C., office and helped build its programs and services.

As executive vice president, Matt has senior responsibility for overseeing Achieve's major initiatives. He supervises Achieve's work with states and helps shape the organization's national agenda. Matt played a lead role in organizing the 1999 and 2001 National Education Summits attended by governors, corporate CEOs and education leaders from across the country.

Matt has extensive experience reviewing academic standards and education policies in the United States and abroad, and he has written dozens of reports and articles on the topic. He also has served on a variety of national and international panels and has helped advise academic standards commissions and legislative bodies in numerous states.

Before joining Achieve, Matt was assistant director for Educational Issues at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), where he oversaw the national organization's work on education standards, testing and accountability. He helped the AFT launch a variety of programs and publications designed to support standards-based reform efforts in states and school districts. He was the author and chief architect of Making Standards Matter, an annual AFT report evaluating the quality of the academic standards, assessments and accountability policies in the 50 states. He also wrote a series of reports entitled Defining World Class Standards, which compared student standards and achievement in the United States with that of other industrialized nations.

Prior to his role with AFT, Matt served as assistant director of the Educational Excellence Network, an organization founded by Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch. In addition to work on domestic policy issues, Matt was responsible for directing a series of projects aimed at helping emerging democracies around the world build democratic education systems.

Matt is a proud graduate of the public school system in the state of Maryland. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.