Entrepreneurs change careers, help build better schools
From Wednesday, November 06, 2002
There's a growing trend among Americans in their 20s and 30s to take their entrepreneurial skills and apply them to building better schools according to this Washington Post story a few days back. For example, Stacy Boyd worked for the for-profit Ediston Project a few years ago, then started a successful charter school in her last year of business school and created a computerized system for aligning each student's lessons with state standards.
Now, five days short of her 33rd birthday, Boyd has her own company in San Francisco, Project Achieve, and is involved in a $3.5 million, federally funded effort to place her lesson-tracking system throughout the country.
She may have an unusual life story so far, but experts say there are many more like her. In the last few years, young Americans have been swept up in a national movement to fix public schools and are finding new career paths created by, among other things, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law.
Some of these educational entrepreneurs are involved in the more than 2,400 independent, but tax-supported, charter schools that have blossomed since Boyd read Chubb and Moe. Some have joined think tanks and foundations that promote educational experiments. Some are in technology firms, Web site businesses, teacher associations and universities.