Celebrate the Power of Freedom in Education
Registration is now open for the Yass Prize 2024 Summit on September 12th, 2024 in New York City, New York!
Learn About All The Yass Prize and STOP Award Winners!
Future of Education Podcast
Check out this thoughtful interview with innovation guru and author Michael Horn, who interviewed Anthony Brock, Co-Founder of Valiant Cross Academy, 2023 Yass Prize winner and Jeanne Allen, our CEO. Learn how giving education leaders freedom and flexibility to deliver personalized, holistic, and career-focused approach; their plans for spreading the benefits of their model; and how winning the Yass Prize will help.
The Yass Prize @ ASU+GSV 2024!
SOAR Academy Featured
Hot off the press! SOAR Academy was featured by the education news organization, The 74 shining a spotlight on their impact in providing opportunities to help neurodiverse students and gain the confidence they need to succeed.The article also highlights the transformational effect of smaller settings on student behavior and success.
Latest News
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NBC travels to NOLA and features unCommon Construction
- April 8, 2024
West Virginia Academy prepares to shine during Open House
- April 6, 2024
Joe Connor: Preparing Alabama families for ESAs
— 2022 Yass Prize & STOP Awards —
Key Dates & Happenings
The Yass Foundation for Education advances the four core STOP principles: Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless education. Each year, the Foundation will reward dozens of organizations, building a growing network of innovative providers that
demonstrate these qualities in their commitment to new ideas, technologies, and approaches to learning that bring education into
the 21st century. The Foundation is powered by the Center for Education Reform (CER) in partnership with Forbes.
We used the Yass Prize to launch a program called Skypod catalyst, which is essentially an accelerator to help other people start microschools.
We believe very much that microschools should be bottoms up, they come from the community. They're founded by educators who know their community really well. And they want to design a learning environment for the kids in that community.
One of the missions of the Yass Prize and the Yass Prize movement is really surfacing best practices in innovation—
in innovators who are doing this type of transformational work, so that others can learn from it and replicate it, so that you can actually grow yourselves.
Being a part of the [Yass] family confirmed that what I'm doing is right,
going against the common core and focusing on what we know is important for kids really works, and having a network of people now that also agree was super huge.
I’m dreaming bigger, bolder, and more bodacious [because of the Yass Prize].
It has helped me raise the ceiling on what’s possible.
The Yass Prize is centered around ensuring that this [program] provides you a stepping stone...
We don’t want you to rinse, wash, repeat. We want you to build and sustain.
Having the status of Yass Prize Semifinalist has opened doors that we’ve been knocking on for years,
including public recognition from our Governor and partnership conversations with other education innovators from around the country.
Being a part of the [Yass] family confirmed that what I'm doing is right,
focusing on what we know is important for kids really works, and having a network of people now that also agree was super huge.
I'm a Yass Prize finalist from last year.
And through that, we were able to open up our second campus in the city of Wichita.
The Yass Prize has significantly impacted the trajectory of our organization.
When we originally applied, we simply provided supplemental support services to homeschooling families. Now, we are growing into an education network that provides community, coaching, and curriculum nationwide.
Education is one of the most fundamental pillars for democratizing opportunities for success that we have in our society.
It’s thanks to organizations like the Yass Prize that our children are going to have a better tomorrow.
When we follow the money, it’s ludicrous how this country is getting away with funding education.
The funding is not following children. We're trying to make better options for kids, for poor kids, middle class kids. Wealthy people have this choice, they opt out of their systems easily, why shouldn't all children have that choice?
We have a tremendously transformative model that could stand for a little disruption.
The Yass experience has given us “permission” to do exactly that.