K-12 Disruptors
Jeanne Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform. In 2021, she launched the Yass Prize, which has awarded more than $84 million to education entrepreneurs. She’s long been deeply invested in the worlds of parental activism and educational choice. And she’s out with a new book, The Education Avengers: How and Why a New Class of Heroes Is Fighting America’s Biggest Battle, which carries an enthusiastic endorsement from the directors of “Avengers: Endgame.” I was curious to hear more about the heroes, the battle, and what Jeanne sees on the ground. Here’s what she had to say.
—Rick
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rick: Jeanne, you’re out with a new book, The Education Avengers. As a Marvel fan, I loved the title. What’s it about?
Jeanne: The book includes 12 stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things because they saw children were being failed and decided they could not look away. They are parents, educators, entrepreneurs, and community leaders from remarkably different backgrounds.
Rick: Was there a particular “aha” moment that sparked this volume?
Jeanne: Meeting the people who have been disrupting the landscape—and realizing they each had their own deeply human stories—was a kind of “aha” moment for me. On a more personal level, a new baby boy with Down syndrome entered my family. It taught me that no matter how close you are to an issue, it doesn’t fully land until it lands in your own life. That experience showed me that there are people working themselves to exhaustion to serve typical students in atypical ways and atypical students in better, more responsive ways.
Rick: How’d you select the dozen people you profiled?
Jeanne: I was trying not to assemble a list of the most famous people in education innovation circles but to mobilize—like the Avengers—people who each bring a different “artifact” to the group. I looked for dramatically different origin stories and a shared pattern of action. Some were propelled by their children, others by faith, loss, injustice, curiosity, or a problem in education that they could not ignore.
