Jason Kamras

Who is Jason Kamras?

Jason Kamras was selected as the 2005 National Teacher of the Year. He is the Chief of the Office of Human Capital and former director of human capital strategy for teachers in D.C. Public Schools, and was an adviser on education policy to the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Before that, he served as a seventh-grade mathematics teacher at John Philip Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C. for eight years.

During his 9-year career, he has taught mathematics and social studies to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. After graduating from Princeton University summa cum laude with a degree in public policy in 1995, Kamras joined Teach For America, which placed him at Sousa. He piloted changes in the mathematics curriculum that helped the percentage of students scoring "below basic" on the Stanford 9 test to fall from 80 percent to 40 percent in one year.He successfully lobbied Sousa administrators to double the amount of class time spent on math. In addition, he is the founder of the EXPOSE camera club, which teaches students to use digital photography to depict their lives. This project earned him the Mayor's Art Award for Outstanding Contributions to Arts Education.