Social entrepreneurship suddenly has become fashionable in the world of education reform. On the presidential campaign trail, John McCain has declared his support for choice-based reform and entrepreneurial endeavors, while Barack Obama has proposed creating a public-private Social Entrepreneurship Agency in the White House and has voiced his admiration for charter schools and programs like Teach For America. K–12 ventures across the country—including the KIPP schools, The New Teacher Project, and the Mind Trust in Indianapolis—are drawing national attention with their use of innovative and unusual methods to better schools. An examination of how the next president and Congress might help these entrepreneurs spur dramatic improvement in K–12 schooling is therefore timely.

Panelists at this AEI event will assess how a new administration should approach the issue of educational entrepreneurship, especially in light of the pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. In particular, they will explore how policymakers can remove obstacles inhibiting the work of promising new providers of educational services (ranging from tutoring firms to technology developers to textbook manufacturers), adjust funding formulas to recognize and account for entrepreneurial efforts, and rethink strategies for sensible quality control. Panelists include Arthur C. Brooks, author of Social Entrepreneurship: A Modern Approach to Social Value Creation (Prentice Hall, 2008), who will become president of AEI in 2009; Michael Johnston, one of the founders of New Leaders for New Schools, who is now a Denver school principal and an Obama campaign representative; and former Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan, who advises McCain on education. AEI’s director of education policy studies, Frederick M. Hess, will moderate and introduce the topic with a brief presentation of his newly published book, The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship: Possibilities for School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2008).