EdCircuit Staff 
Formerly the CEO for Global Learning and Leadership, Mitrovich brings to Foundations in Learning more than 35 years’ experience as an educator and superintendent
Coralville, Iowa—October 3, 2019—Foundations in Learning, creator of the Foundations Learning System™, today announced that Mark Mitrovich has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer. Mitrovich joins the company at an exciting time, following the September launch of the Foundations Learning System. The integrated system includes a screener, diagnostic and intervention solution designed to make visible the needs of underserved students in second grade through high school who struggle with reading comprehension and fluency due to poor word recognition skills.
“I am honored to join Foundations in Learning and embrace the opportunity to work closely alongside the company’s co-founders, Dr. Carolyn Brown and Dr. Jerry Zimmermann, to expand awareness and implementation of their timely and innovative solution to address a critical issue in reading failure—one of the most perplexing and persistent problems facing education in this country,” said Mitrovich. “Based on years of research and development in collaboration with scientists at the University of Iowa and school districts, the Foundations System leverages a powerful learning framework from cognitive science and gives school systems a proven way to identify, diagnose and remediate struggling readers who have been left behind despite years of well-meaning interventions. I firmly believe this is not just a reading solution, but a framework to support learning outcomes that truly transform the lives of at-risk students.”
Most recently, Mitrovich was CEO for Global Learning and Leadership (GL2), a not-for-profit consultancy he founded, dedicated to building capacity within school districts and communities to increase student achievement and success. In addition, he brings to Foundations in Learning 35 years of experience as an educator and district leader, including superintendent positions in Gig Harbor, Wash., and Naperville, Ill. Mitrovich was also Chief Academic Officer for the School Services Division of Pearson North America and has consulted for districts across the United States, as well as for state and federal agencies, superintendents’ associations, Apple, Microsoft, the New York City Board of Education, and the Ministries of Education in New Zealand and Victoria, Australia.
“We are thrilled to welcome Mark Mitrovich to Foundations in Learning. His impressive commitment to education and innovation, proven over the course of a long career in numerous high-profile roles, is clear evidence of his perfect fit as our CEO,” said Dr. Carolyn Brown, President and co-founder of Foundations in Learning. “Mark has demonstrated his willingness to tackle a variety of challenges in pursuit of equal access to educational and economic opportunities for all children. We are confident that this same thoughtful and passionate approach will significantly advance our efforts to improve educational equity through literacy.”
One of Mitrovich’s first initiatives in his new role is to ensure that education leaders and stakeholders nationwide have access to an effective solution, in the form of the Foundations Learning System, to help struggling readers reach proficiency. The Foundations System is an innovative solution that applies the learning framework known as the “Varied Practice Model,” which is proven to enhance automatic skill development in many other domains—including sports, music, language and math—to the development of automatic word recognition skills, an essential precursor of fluency and reading comprehension. Using the system, educators can quickly identify and help students whose academic progress has stagnated due to a lack of foundational reading skills, including persistently struggling readers, students with special needs and English language learners.
Mitrovich is also eager to introduce the education community to the depth of research behind Foundations in Learning’s solutions. Dr. Brown and Dr. Zimmermann have spent more than 30 years studying the needs of struggling readers, and the Foundations Learning System is built on 10 years of research and product development. For the development of the screener and diagnostic, they collaborated with Dr. Bob McMurray, Dr. Eliot Hazeltine, Dr. Deborah Read and Dr. Keith Apfelbaum, who are cognitive scientists and/or reading researchers from the University of Iowa. Support was provided by the SBIR program at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences under contract ED-IES-15-C-0023. Additionally, through a series of National Science Foundation awards, Professors McMurray and Hazeltine have demonstrated that the principles underlying expert skill learning are applicable to learning to read.
For more information on bringing the Foundations Learning System to a school or district, call 888-701-3009 ext. 100 or contact Foundations in Learning by email at info@foundations-learning.com.
About Foundations in Learning
Foundations in Learning is a provider of scientifically based, empirically derived intervention solutions for elementary and middle school age students. The company’s researchers and program developers have decades of experience in creating, testing, and providing schools with effective programs to meet the individual needs of their students. Foundations in Learning’s technology-delivered, research-based programs are supported by learning models that have been demonstrated to be effective in areas of learning that are particularly relevant to the development, application and generalization of reading and mathematics skills. Learn more at
Chaz Austin