Ben Rayer has led an amazing life and journey, traversing our country’s education continuum from the front lines as a Teach for America teacher to the headquarters of the Philadelphia School District as their Chief Charter and New Schools Officer over 100 schools to the President and COO of Mastery Charter Schools to the incubation and launch of Touchstone Education and its founding blended charter middle school Merit Prep. Ben has experienced life as a public school teacher, a District Leader, a Charter School Network President, a start-up founder and CEO of an ed-tech, next generation school and now takes on his next adventure with Matchbook Learning.
With Touchstone Education combining forces with Matchbook Learning, Ben will lend his multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary skill-set and leadership to helping Matchbook Learning scale to the heights of our vision, combining our approaches to blended learning, school design and capacity building into one seamless approach. Ben will serve as Matchbook Learning’s new Chief Strategy Officer and will be primarily responsible for leading how we ready our blended charter school turnaround model for national scale. Ben participated in an interview regarding his role with Matchbook Learning.
What would you describe as the biggest challenge of being our Chief Strategy Officer?
Creating a successful personalized learning school model that can be replicated across the United States and identifying the best opportunities to expand our reach.
What are your goals for this next year?
To get our school model well enough defined to begin opening additional schools in new regions and to identify the most promising places for Matchbook Learning to expand its reach.
What makes the new Matchbook Learning such an exciting place to work?
The expanded resources of the combined Matchbook Learning and Touchstone Education teams provide our organization a special opportunity to change education in America. We bring a talented team and the necessary resources to the challenge of reinventing school.
