June updates: GT School Grant and Our New Legal Director

Happy summer, everyone! Things will pick up a lot around here this month, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s coming down the pipeline. To start off, we’re thrilled to announce two major milestones for the Center for Educational Progress. We’ve received our first substantial grant funding, and with it, we’ve hired Thomas Briggs as our legal director.

GT School Grant

Recently, we secured a transformative $100,000 grant sponsored by the innovative GT School. The terms of the grant were generous — they believe passionately in the importance of excellence-focused education, and we are free to pursue the projects we believe are best towards that end. Not out of obligation, then, but out of gratitude and in the hope of giving people a clear picture of who we’re working with, I’d like to share a bit about GT School itself.

The school is a new private K-8 institution in Georgetown, Texas founded after the success of its sister organization Alpha School in integrating new AI tools into education. GT School (student slogan: “We will be the last humans smarter than AI.”) is focused specifically on students with extraordinary potential, based on a firm conviction that the schooling system as it stands comes nowhere close to meeting those students’ needs. Students at GT school spend two hours a day in focused, AI-guided academic study of core subjects, with the other four hours of the school day split into a range of advanced academic and life skills workshops. Recently, two of its students, Krish Bhakta and Jaiden Bhakta, placed first in the United States and second in the world in the Global AI Debates, a competition aimed at fostering AI literacy among students.

We’re humbled and grateful for the support the school has provided as we work to foster an excellence-focused counterculture within education. Keep an eye on both them and Alpha School — they’re some of the most exciting experiments in the K-12 education world today.

With this momentum, we’re thrilled to welcome Thomas Briggs as our Legal Director. Thomas joins us from Los Angeles, where he recently completed his law degree at UCLA. You’ll see and hear much more from him going forward, both through his posts on here and his work on expanding our organizational capacity. For now, here’s his introduction:

Joining the CEP, and some initial thoughts about today’s education policy circus

Hello, CEP Substack readers! My name is Thomas Briggs (a few might know me by my online handle “zzzwakeup”), and I’m beyond excited to join Jack and Lily at the Center for Educational Progress. I recently finished my journey through law school at UCLA, so a big part of my job will be handling day-to-day duties as the Center’s Legal Director. Besides learning about all the wonderful forms and filings legal compliance truly requires of a new organization, my other primary role will be keeping the Center — and the amazing community we’ve begun building¹ — on top of the most important legal battles, legislative fights, and regulatory changes going on in the education policy and legal worlds. Today that begins with perhaps the hardest task — writing this get-to-know-me post — but starting now and over the coming weeks you’ll find me here and over on my Twitter page discussing education policy and all things law and politics relating to it. Today I am going to talk a little bit about what’s been catching my eye in the news, what my background is, and lastly what sorts of posts I’ll be sharing with you all in the near future.

An environment like today’s is both a promising and also deeply uncertain and chaotic one in which to launch an organization like ours. Trump’s flurry of new executive orders indicates some prioritization of “meritocracy,” but also signals the beginning of an about-face on decades of Civil Rights law that is challenging not just universities and colleges, but schools across all levels, whether they’re aiming to reform disciplinary policies or attempting to defend legally-tenuous programs aimed at helping underprivileged kids. Instead of directing future-oriented leaders and thinkers towards the hard problem of foundation-building in this new era, the country continues to tear itself up in a noisy battle where “education” has become more like a political football than a serious area of policy and debate.

The particular battles being waged between the Trump Administration and certain “Ivy Plus” schools, notably Harvard and Columbia, have proven unproductive for everyone involved so far. Professors who over the past decade made a name for themselves calling out institutional excesses — like Steven Pinker calling the Harvard admissions policy an “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief” — now find themselves defending those same institutions against an administration echoing the attacks they themselves made over the past decade. Meanwhile, the White House’s task force on antisemitism apparently never intended to send the letter to Harvard that kicked off the current snowballing standoff between the school and the administration. What a mess.

It’s not at all clear what any of these changes will mean long-term for education policy and educational culture in America. Perhaps the biggest stake in all of this is our ability to keep our eyes on the ball: are American schools making our kids better readers, writers, scientists and citizens? This task is of course made all the more difficult the more education becomes a load-bearing issue for our political identities, as it likely already has. It would still be a mistake, though, to believe that education polarization is a foregone conclusion: politics will always present new opportunities for those with the right priorities to build, rather than to merely tear down. I don’t know anyone in my milieu — obviously myself included — who would have guessed that it would be a collection of Southern states, so often maligned by us coastal types, that would take such a commanding lead in successfully restoring evidence-based science of reading curricula to elementary schools, especially among minority students. But America is a deeply complicated, often paradoxical society, and thus presents unique opportunities for bipartisanship and depolarization, even in confusing and chaotic circumstances like these.

Lamenting the politicization of education policy might just be historically ignorant, anyway. I came to law school from an academic philosophy background — Lily and Jack were kind enough to overlook that red flag — and the book we’re all forced to read several times, Plato’s Republic, is essentially a large exercise in designing a city with a politics that can keep a certain elitist form of education intact. It’s hard not to look at today’s pitched political battles over higher education and notice that a similar exercise might have failed to live up to the mission it set out to do. Even if it has, too many Americans seem to think otherwise, and either way I’m sure some new communications strategy is already underway inside many colleges across the country.

The tsunami of new laws and policies that will be written — in courts, federal agencies, state and federal² legislatures, and in schools themselves — demand the attention of interested advocates like us here at the CEP, and so figuring out what these changes mean for excellence in education is going to be a top priority. Beyond this new educational-legal landscape, though, I also look forward to writing about other topics, like what I’ve learned over my years of tutoring high schoolers that often go on to elite colleges and universities; the importance of competition and order for fostering excellence; and left-field solutions to the problems gripping higher ed admissions. And, as I said at the beginning, I’m beyond excited to work with Jack, Lily, and everyone else at the Center fighting to reshape educational culture here in America. For better or worse, there’s never been a better time to try.

1. Join the Center for Educational Progress Discord channel!

2. Maybe not this particular legislature; we’ll have to see.