Lora Cover has over 25 years of talent experience, spending most of her career sitting on the operational side. For over a decade she worked at Teach For America, recruiting teachers and then building a human assets team for the organization, ultimately leading the People and Talent work there.

She then went on to be the Chief Talent Officer at Cleveland Metropolitan School District where she developed the vision and team to lead Cleveland's Plan for transforming schools by ensuring great educators join and make a career in the 7,000 employee, 9 union, school district. She increased external applicants for teacher positions by 71% in one year by creating an aggressive recruitment campaign, retained 95% of teachers with an accomplished observation rating and exited 48% of teachers with an ineffective observation rating. She also oversaw the development and implementation of a first-ever compensation and evaluation system for non-bargaining staff resulting in a goals-driven culture in the central office. She took her career managing People and Talent teams and moved to consulting both for Bellwether Education Partners, where she built her toolkit of frameworks and trend-spotting and then was a founding Partner of Promise54, where she led the talent practice.

Lora holds a Bachelor’s degree in Labor Relations from Cornell University and a Masters of Public Administration from The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She currently resides in Shaker Heights, OH, where she is president of the School Board. With both of her kids away at college, she shares her empty nest with her husband and pandemic puppy, Olive.