From corporate executive to school leader

© Photograph by Alex Harris

Beverly Ryder has come full circle.

A product of Los Angeles’ postwar black middle class, Ryder graduated from Dorsey High in 1968, and was part of the first big wave of African Americans to attend Stanford University. Then she was among the first large group of women MBAs to move into management in the corporate world.

And now she’s back at a high school in her hometown, trying to help revive public school education in a city where half the high schools are designated as failing and fewer than half of high school students graduate.

“I grew up in Los Angeles. I went to public schools here. The L.A. schools helped make me what I am,” Ryder says. “Why can’t that be done today?”

Ryder’s return is as much generational as it is geographical. She is on the leading edge of a wave of baby boomers entering a new stage of life and work and looking for purpose even more than pay.

She came of age during a heated time. The year she entered Stanford, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Urban riots flared, and the Black Power movement gained momentum worldwide. Ryder’s approach was quiet rather than inflammatory. She was a petition signer, not a bomb thrower.

“I’m one of those people who really believes that to make change, you have to do it from both sides – the outside and the inside,” she says.. You need external pressure, but I’m not an external radical. Hopefully if you are in the right place, you can make that change from the inside.”

At Stanford, she came up with a three-part plan for her life. First, she’d learn how the world works through understanding finance, economics, and the business world. Then she’d take her understanding and her management skills to the non-profit sector. Finally, she’d teach.

Ryder took her first job at Citibank in New York getting an insider’s understanding into the workings of the business world. She spent sixteen years helping to run the bank’s corporate
finance division and then was recruited by Edison International to a senior management position in her hometown of Los Angeles.

She thrived at Edison, rising to the position of a corporate officer over the course of a dozen years. She enjoyed her work, her colleagues and the CEOS under whom she served. But something else was pulling at her.

Ryder remembers being in meetings in her past jobs, standing up to argue for a particular action, while at the same time thinking, In the big picture, what is this really going to do?
How much will it really matter whether the decision is made one way or another? It was a refrain that became louder and more insistent as Ryder discovered that L.A.’s once-accomplished high schools had become the sorest spots in California’s ravaged educational system.

Ryder jumped in, volunteering with civic associations and serving on nonprofit boards, among them the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Urban League, and the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. She convinced Edison to make her a “loaned executive” to the L.A. Unified School District.

Ryder began work at Crenshaw High, Dorsey’s cross-town rival, launching a model program to build connections between the school and the local community. At the district offices, she helped create a new office to spur partnerships between the district and individual schools and corporations and outside groups.

She sometimes worked fifteen-hour days, arriving at daybreak to meet with the principal, going to community meetings late into the night.

In 2006, drawing on her years in the corporate world and her recent experiences in the public schools, Ryder applied to and was accepted by the Broad Academy, a ten-month program preparing leaders from the private sector, the military and the nonprofit world to become urban public school superintendents.

“Education is the civil rights movement of the twenty-first century,” she says. “We cannot afford as a democracy to leave as many kids behind and unprepared as we have.”

It took longer than she expected for Ryder to realize the third-part of the plan she laid out back at Stanford. But there was never any real doubt she’d make good on her dreams.

“There is something that draws us in,” she says. “For some reason, our generation says ‘We’ve got to do something.’ We can’t just let it go.”