Education Pioneers

Founded in 2003, Education Pioneers' mission is to attract, develop, and mobilize a diverse network of high potential future leaders who will bring the capacity needed to solve education's evolving set of challenges so that education can become a lever for equity and excellence. <br><br>We find, develop, and catalyze leaders and managers outside the classroom so that students and teachers can succeed inside the classroom. We've built a leadership pipeline for management talent that is unmatched in scale and scope. Our network is now 4,600+ Alumni strong - 1 in 2 who identify as leaders of color and 70% of whom stay in education long term.

Public education can and should be a lever for equity-but it isn’t currently. No matter your race

As a leadership development organization, Education Pioneers enthusiastically invests in the development of our Fellows, Alumni, staff, and leaders. Our Fellowships shape leaders’ long-term mindsets and orientations towards education leadership. Through full cohort convenings, small group Communities of Practice, and one-on-one coaching, we grow individual Fellow’s capacity and potential for leadership and spark a lifelong interest in improving public education, serving students and families, and closing the opportunity gap. For our Alumni, we are building a future where the EP network is the fabric through which they are connecting, learning, and being inspired to drive change collaboratively with one another and with other leaders in education. For staff, we are currently engaged in a scope and sequence of professional development modules to develop trust and adaptability. Our organization also invests in development for our senior leaders, such as Pahara Fellowship for our CEO.

We’re proud to partner with leading education organizations whose work affects the lives of millions of students. From our largest school districts to charter school organizations, nonprofits and government agencies, Education Pioneers’ talent is helping these organizations transform lives. In our most recently completed cohort, our COVID Recovery Fellows served in some of the largest public school districts, Charter Management Organizations, and state education agencies in the country including New York City Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools, KIPP: Atlanta, Rocketship Public Schools, and the Texas Education Agency. Along with our work to recruit, select, place and support our Fellows, we also cultivate our network of Alumni who are poised--individually and collectively--to have impact and transform systems. Our Alumni leaders are rising in position and influence in the sector with the connections to collaborate and amplify impact.

As we contemplated how to respond to COVID-19, Education Pioneers (EP) made internal and programmatic changes to respond. Internally, we went remote and shrank our budget. Programmatically, we temporarily paused a long-term Fellowship program to launch a new responsive Fellowship. We recognized that schools would face meaningful disruption during and beyond the pandemic given K-12’s critical role providing essential services to vulnerable students and communities in congregate settings. Moreover, our work in the field allowed us to anticipate the substantial volume of new work districts would have to address. EP’s COVID Response Fellowship (CRF) aimed to support those needs and enable the improved response and resilience of schools as a critical community support and service. With philanthropic support, EP created CRF and provided Chief of Staff-level supports to senior leaders in Local Education Authorities (LEAs), State Education Authorities (SEAs) and support organizations in record time. COVID Response Fellows supported systems to react to the novel challenges of the pandemic, navigating ever-changing guidance, knowledge, and resources while adapting operations and access to instruction, adding capacity to the critical efforts to keep the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized students central to decision-making. In total, EP’s COVID Response Fellows provided critical capacity to 23 LEAs, SEAs and support organizations serving more than 7 million students, over 60% of whom identified as Black / African American or Latinx, and over 60% of whom qualified for free- or reduced-price lunch. The senior leadership teams of our Partner organizations received the additional capacity of adaptive, inclusive, talented leaders who were equipped to transform the education sector in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as high-quality resources to support both short-term implementation and long-term steps necessary to inform needed systems-level change.