For more than twenty years Catherine Marciano has devoted her professional career to equity through education as a teacher, evidence-based program innovator, data collector and analyst, and dynamic senior leader of New York City based educational non-profits for social good.
As an ally and competent strategist, Catherine has a proven track record of developing best-in-class programs that support individuals from traditionally underserved groups, in particular Black, Latino, low-income and first-generation students, in achieving post-secondary success. Most recently, as Managing Director of College Services for KIPP NYC Through College (KTC NYC), Catherine led design and implementation of internal strategies and external partnerships that boosted college completion rates for KIPP NYC alumni from 38% to a historically high 54%—all while the program scaled from serving 400 students to more than 2,200.
Known for her expertise in making data-driven decisions, Catherine worked collaboratively with KIPP NYC’s secondary school data team to use student outcomes and indicators as predictors of college success and then leveraged that data in KTC’s flagship one-to-one college and career advising program. Beginning in 2010 and revised annually since Catherine developed KTC NYC’s student-centered transition-to-college programming yielding an annual summer melt rate of 4%, as compared to 10% for KIPP alumni nationally.
From 2015-2018 Catherine participated on a committee to inform KIPP’s national college and career strategy resulting in the national adoption of a rubric and algorithm she co-designed in NYC in order to benchmark and segment college students’ academic and socioemotional growth semiannually. Under Catherine’s leadership, KIPP Through College’s NYC region became the highest performing of all 20 KTC regions nationally.
Prior to her work with the KIPP CMO, Catherine was the Program Director of Student Sponsor Partners (SSP), a New York City nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide low-income, high potential students with a quality high school education. In that role, Catherine led SSP to its highest historical high school graduation rate – 90%, an increase of over 10 percentage points. In addition to her skills developing people and programs, Catherine has deep technical expertise in database management; she served as the regional Salesforce administrator for KIPP NYC and the Raiser’s Edge database administrator at SSP. A native of Cleveland, OH, Catherine has lived in New York City for 22 years. Catherine holds a BS in Mathematics from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN.
