Reid Saaris studied government and teaching at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in government and the certification to teach secondary school social studies. His summa cum laude thesis received the Thomas Hoopes Prize for excellence. Latest Generation: The Civic Greatness of Young Americans disputed the idea that young Americans are disengaged and apathetic, and traced political inequalities back to inequity in educational opportunities.

After graduating, Saaris coached soccer and cross-country running and taught history, economics, philosophy, and psychology at a large, rural high school in South Carolina for three years. In his last year, he was promoted to an administrative position, heading the AP and IB programs at the school. “I was committed to ensure that no student in my school would be overlooked for participation in AP or IB because of the color of their skin or the size of their parents’ income,” he says.

When the IB program grew by more than two times to become the largest in the state, Saaris believed he had found a relatively simple, high-impact reform that could transform the lives of missing students across the country. He founded Equal Opportunity Schools, and wrote a paper for the Education Trust in Washington, D.C., on the “missing” students’ problem. While attending the Stanford GSB and School of Education, he has been running EOS’s first district-level pilot in California. He graduated with a joint MBA/MA in June 2010, and now embarks on EOS’s first funded year.