Ashley Furan, Ed.M.

Ashley Furan is a Partner at BetterEd Solutions and an educational leader, founding school executive, charter school strategist, and executive and instructional coach with more than 15 years of experience helping schools launch, grow, strengthen instruction, develop leaders, and navigate high-stakes accountability. Her work sits at the intersection of charter founding and renewal, school improvement and transformation, organizational growth, leadership development, instructional coaching, and strategic execution. Across her career, Furan has served as a founding Head of School, assistant principal, teacher and team leader, educational consultant, adjunct professor, and nonprofit co-founder, giving her a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to move an educational vision from concept to implementation and ultimately to sustainable institutional performance.

Furan brings particular expertise across the charter school lifecycle. She understands that founding a charter school requires far more than developing a compelling application or mission. The work requires translating an approved charter into a functioning organization with strong leadership, effective instructional systems, disciplined operations, sound finances, a healthy adult culture, clear accountability, and the capacity to earn the confidence of families, boards, authorizers, and communities. Her experience spans founding-stage planning, application-to-launch implementation, organizational growth, authorizer and board alignment, compliance, continuous improvement, and charter renewal.

That experience is most clearly demonstrated through her leadership of Hebrew Language Academy 2 Charter School in Brooklyn, New York. Furan served as the school’s Founding Head of School from 2017 through 2022, leading the organization from its opening through the completion of its initial charter term. During that period, she helped transform a newly authorized charter into an operating school community, guiding the school’s planned growth from its early elementary launch through a full K–5 program while building the organizational systems necessary to support increasing enrollment, staffing, academic expectations, and operational complexity.

As Founding Head of School, Furan cultivated and led a staff community of more than 60 educators and professionals. She oversaw recruitment, hiring, onboarding, management, and professional development; managed an approximately $8.8 million budget; led school operations, facilities, safety, and compliance; and established systems for continuous improvement across instruction, culture, and operations. She also facilitated alignment among families, community organizations, the Board of Directors, and the school’s authorizer, while using strategic planning, data analysis, and organizational learning cycles to strengthen academic performance and institutional effectiveness.

Furan also led Hebrew Language Academy 2 through its first charter renewal cycle, giving her direct experience with one of the most consequential accountability processes a charter school can face. In May 2022, the New York State Board of Regents approved the school’s first renewal and extended its charter through June 30, 2025. NYSED also reported that HLA2 had received an accountability designation of Good Standing in every year of its initial charter term. In approving the renewal, the Regents found that the school met applicable legal requirements, demonstrated the ability to operate in an educationally and fiscally sound manner, and that renewal was likely to improve student learning and provide significant educational benefit to students. For Furan, the experience reinforced that successful renewal is not simply an application-writing exercise. It is the culmination of years of evidence: governance, academic performance, financial stewardship, compliance, organizational health, leadership capacity, stakeholder confidence, and a credible plan for continued improvement.

That founding-to-renewal experience makes Furan particularly valuable to charter leaders preparing for new school development, launch, expansion, renewal, or significant organizational change. She understands how authorizers evaluate schools and how leaders must connect the narrative of a school’s mission to measurable evidence that the organization can execute. Her work helps leadership teams strengthen the underlying systems that make a renewal application credible, organize evidence, clarify strategic priorities, align boards and executives, address areas of weakness before they become existential risks, and articulate a clear case for why a school should continue to serve its community.

Furan’s school improvement work is equally grounded in instructional leadership. Before founding Hebrew Language Academy 2, she served as an Assistant Principal and Leadership Resident at Success Academy Charter Schools, where she drove continuous improvement through individualized instructional coaching, observation and feedback, professional development, school culture systems, and data analysis. Her work required translating student performance data into concrete changes in teacher practice while developing educators toward increasingly rigorous expectations for instruction and student achievement.

Her credibility as an instructional coach is rooted in her own classroom results. Earlier in her career, Furan served as a teacher and team leader at Explore Charter School in Brooklyn, where her third-grade students achieved 98 percent proficiency on the 2012 New York State mathematics assessment, a result identified in her professional record as the highest proficiency rate among New York State public charter schools at that grade level that year. She also supported grade-team planning and instructional delivery and collaborated on mathematics scope and sequence development across grades K–8. Her subsequent work at KIPP Journey Academy and Girls Prep Lower East Side Middle School further strengthened her expertise in data-driven instruction, differentiation, inclusive learning, teacher collaboration, and the development of strong classroom culture.

Furan’s work with adults extends beyond school-based coaching. As an adjunct professor at Touro College, she supported graduate-level educators in literacy instruction, differentiated learning, assessment, language development, and the needs of students with disabilities, English learners, and gifted students. Her experience developing educators across classroom, school leadership, and graduate learning environments informs an approach to coaching that is both rigorous and highly individualized. She works to help leaders and teachers see the connection between the decisions adults make and the outcomes students ultimately experience.

Since moving into consulting, Furan has supported schools and education professionals in organizational growth strategy, professional learning and coaching, curriculum and instruction, talent management, organizational and school culture, diversity and inclusion, stakeholder alignment, board management, compliance, and charter renewal. Her public professional profile also reflects a focus on educational consulting and leadership development. This combination of executive, instructional, governance, and organizational experience allows her to support leaders not only in identifying what needs to change, but in building the systems and adult capacity necessary to make the change last.

At BetterEd Solutions, Furan’s work is centered on charter founding, application development and renewal, school improvement and transformation, organizational growth, executive and principal coaching, and instructional coaching. She supports founders and school leaders as they move from concept and charter application through authorization and launch, helps established charter schools prepare for renewal and authorizer scrutiny, coaches executives and principals through periods of organizational change, and works with instructional leaders to strengthen teaching, professional learning, observation and feedback, and data-driven improvement systems.

Her approach is particularly valuable in moments when an organization cannot afford ambiguity. A founding team preparing to open a school needs clarity about what must be built and in what sequence. A school approaching renewal needs an honest assessment of whether its academic, fiscal, governance, operational, and compliance evidence will withstand scrutiny. A principal inheriting a struggling organization needs to know what to fix first. A leadership team attempting to grow needs systems that can scale without sacrificing quality. Furan helps leaders translate these complex challenges into priorities, structures, milestones, and executable next steps.

Furan also brings a strong understanding of organizational culture and stakeholder leadership to transformation work. At Hebrew Language Academy 2, she developed structures intended to promote collaboration, goal setting, coaching, compassion, curiosity, and cross-cultural communication. She has worked extensively with families, boards, educators, community stakeholders, and authorizers and understands that sustainable school improvement depends on both technical competence and relational trust. Her work reflects the belief that high expectations and human-centered leadership reinforce rather than contradict one another.

Earlier in her career, Furan co-founded Promoting Immigrant Voices in Education, an initiative designed to increase the meaningful participation of immigrant parents in public schools. She has also served in educational roles in Ghana and the Dominican Republic. These experiences broadened her understanding of family engagement, cross-cultural leadership, and the importance of designing schools in partnership with the communities they serve. While her work today is primarily focused on organizational and leadership transformation, that foundation continues to inform how she approaches stakeholder alignment and educational equity.

Furan earned her bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s degree in education from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alumna and holds a Certificate in School Management and Leadership through Harvard Business School Online and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as a certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business. She also holds New York State professional certification in Childhood Education.

Across her career, Furan has developed a distinctive ability to work at both the strategic and instructional levels of a school. She can help a board and executive team think through charter renewal, governance, growth, and organizational risk while also helping a principal or instructional leader strengthen coaching, teaching, professional learning, and student outcomes. That ability to connect governance, strategy, people, instruction, and execution is central to her contribution to BetterEd’s school transformation work.

At BetterEd Solutions, Furan contributes to the organization’s vision of transforming schools in our nation’s most underserved communities into happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive. Her work helps schools move from aspiration to evidence: from an idea for a new charter to a functioning institution, from a renewal deadline to a stronger organization, from isolated improvement efforts to coherent systems, and from leadership intention to measurable results for students.

Her leadership philosophy is captured in a principle she has carried in her professional work: “Each of us is a learner. Each of us is a teacher. Each of us is a problem solver.”