Meet the team
Keri Rodrigues
Matthew, Miles and David's Mom, President and Mom-in-Chief
Keri Rodrigues is Matthew, Miles and David's mom, and the co-founder and president of the National Parents Union. She launched NPU on January 18, 2020. Today it represents more than 2.15 million families through more than 2,200 affiliated parent organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Across a 25-year career that runs from radio to national organizing, Keri has become one of the leading voices of modern American parents and families. She convenes thousands of parents across the country so their voices shape policy, and she puts parents in the driver's seat as families protect their kids and prepare them for a new digital world.
Keri is a leading global voice on how AI and technology are changing the lives of children and families, and she brings the parent perspective into that global conversation. The work stands on NPU's evidence: the longest-running national poll of parents in America, tracking where families stand on AI, screen time, technology and modern family life. The National Parents Union is also leading the federal conversation on literacy.
Keri serves on the steering committee of EdPwr, helping lead the coalition reimagining public education into a system worthy of America's children, and on the board of Educators for Excellence. She has served on the U.S. Department of Education's National Parent and Family Engagement Council and the Children's Equity Project Family Advisory Committee at Arizona State University.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NBC Nightly News, CNN, Fox News, POLITICO and The Boston Globe. She has lectured at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Georgetown Law. NPU has been named National Advocate of the Year by UnidosUS and Change Agent of the Year by ERN, and received CASEL's Caregiver Award for Outstanding Leadership in Social and Emotional Learning.
Keri was thrown out of school as a teenager and told she would never amount to anything. No program came to rescue her. She got out the long way. It is why she is relentless about her own kids' education, and she makes no apology for it.
Parents are going to keep asking the questions and holding schools accountable for getting this right.
The leaders doing the work
Professor Jason B. Allen
National Director of Partnerships
Jason B. Allen, known to many as ProfessorJBA, is an educator, organizer and storyteller from Atlanta, where he went to school from kindergarten through 12th grade. He holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in special education from the University of West Georgia, and he has spent more than 17 years in education as a special education and general education teacher, a school administrator at The RISE Schools–Prep and a family engagement specialist. He has also covered education as a reporter for the Indianapolis Recorder. At NPU he builds partnerships across the country, including NPU's support of the April 2026 Georgia Gubernatorial Education Forum at Morehouse College, hosted by the Center for Strong Public Schools.
Dr. Charles Barone
Senior Fellow
Dr. Charles Barone brings three decades in education service, research, policy and advocacy. He previously served as NPU's Senior Director of the Center for Innovation, as Vice President for K-12 Policy at Education Reform Now and director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform, and as a Deputy Staff Director and Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives working on education. He is a frequent national voice on assessment, accountability and public school choice.
Tafshier Cosby
Senior Director, Center for Organizing and Partnerships
Tafshier Cosby is a movement builder, parent leader, and national organizing strategist who believes lasting systems change begins with the most impacted families leading the way. As Senior Director of the Center for Organizing and Partnerships at the National Parents Union, Tafshier designs and leads people-powered strategies that place families at the center of policy, advocacy, and accountability. With over 25 years of experience across grassroots organizing, coalition building, and national campaigns, her work is grounded in reimagining what is possible when communities are trusted with power.
Tafshier’s leadership is informed by service on state and national committees, formal training in education finance and governance, and most importantly her lived experience in Newark, NJ as a mother and grandmother. Guided by joy, curiosity, and collective care, Tafshier leads with the belief that parent power is essential to change, not supplemental.
Tim Langan
Chief Operating Officer
Emilie Martin
Research Associate
Emilie Martin joined the National Parents Union in the summer of 2023. She is the author of NPU's report The New Reading Revolution: How States Are Rewriting the Literacy Story (September 2025), and in September 2026 she wrote NPU's analysis of the new Head Start rule and what it means for the country's most vulnerable kids. She started out writing The Voice Box, the Center for Parent Voice blog, on everything from social media and kids' mental health to rediscovering a love of reading.
Christy Moreno
National Organizing Director
Christy Moreno is a Kansas City mom of two and a veteran education advocate. Before NPU she was Chief Community Advocacy and Impact Officer at Revolución Educativa, a nonprofit advancing Latino youth and families in Missouri and Kansas, and as Director of Advocacy at the Missouri Charter Public School Association she helped win statewide support for funding equity legislation. She owns Moreno Denton Language Services, an interpreting and translation firm serving Spanish and English speakers for more than 20 years. Her honors include NPU's 2024 MVP Award, a 2024 City Fund Leadership Fellowship and a 2023 Kauffman Education Fellowship.
Rianna Saslow
Deputy Director of Policy and Action
Rianna Saslow works on NPU's federal and state policy, from education funding in Congress to how states run the new federal scholarship tax credit, and in 2026 she testified for NPU before the Maryland legislature on open enrollment. Before joining NPU she was a senior policy analyst at Education Reform Now, where she studied 160 high-poverty schools across four states that were getting remarkable results for their students. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ariel Taylor Smith
Senior Director, Center for Policy and Action
Ariel leads federal, state and local policy focused on economic mobility and education justice. Before NPU she co-founded Transform Education Now, a statewide advocacy group in Colorado that organizes parents to demand opportunities for their kids, and she taught at Denver's North High School for five years. She is a mom of two, Noli and Kayce.
Board of Directors
Samuel L. Radford III
Board Chair
Samuel Radford III has organized parents in Buffalo, New York for three decades, including as former president of the Buffalo District Parent Coordinating Council and co-chair of We the Parents of Western New York. A former 7th and 8th grade math teacher and U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he organized a 2011 “Day of Absence” boycott over Buffalo's academic failure rates and was named The Buffalo News Citizen of the Year that year. He served on New York's Statewide Education Commission and President Obama's White House Community Leadership Council for Education, and he raised 14 children through the Buffalo public schools.
Judith Barba Perez
Board Member
Judith Barba Perez served on the Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education for District 2 from February 2021 to January 2023, the first first-generation immigrant to serve on that board. She worked to open board meetings to Spanish-speaking families, bringing agendas and public comment into Spanish, and became a visible advocate for Tulsa's immigrant and refugee communities.
Chris Cullison
Board Member
Chris Cullison brings decades of senior financial leadership, including as an Executive Vice President at CitiCorp in New Jersey and at BayBank in Massachusetts. His banking and financial management background adds fiscal and operational depth to the board's stewardship of a growing national organization.
Jillian Raining Bird
Board Member
Jillian Raining Bird is a Native American education leader from the Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation in north-central Montana, home to the Chippewa Cree Tribe. She carries the perspective of Indigenous families and tribal communities onto the NPU board, a voice too often missing from national education policy.
John Schneider
Board Member
John Schneider played a key staff role in passing and implementing the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 as research director to the legislature's Joint Committee on Education, Arts, and Humanities. He was executive vice president at MassINC, where he led the Gateway Cities policy initiative and the New Skills for a New Economy workforce campaign, and he began his career teaching out-of-school youth in alternative high schools in Chicago and Boston. He currently works at MassInsight.
Arthur Soriano
Board Member
Arthur Soriano is President and CEO of Youth Empowerment, a community nonprofit that leads a grassroots effort to reach at-risk youth and adult gang members. Raised in East San Diego, he spent 23 years caught in gang life and the prison system before his love for his community brought him back to serve it. He and his wife Gabby are raising four children.
Anashay Wright
Board Member
Anashay Wright is the founder and Chief Disruptor of the consulting firm Disruptive Partners, with more than 20 years at every level of the K-12 system and experience as a higher-education adjunct professor. She has led teams at Leading Educators, TNTP and the Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes Foundation, and she joined the NPU board to lift the voices of racially diverse communities across the network.