Founder

With a personal commitment to educational equity & excellence that traces back to seeing his best friend not receive the same quality of education he did, Reid founded Equal Opportunity Schools to help school leaders provide all students an equal opportunity to achieve their dreams.

Under Reid’s tenure as CEO, Equal Opportunity Schools pursued its mission to ensure that students of all backgrounds have equal access to the most challenging high school programs, growing the organization to seventy full-time staff serving 600 high schools across 30 states, and adding tens of thousands of students of color and low-income students to successful advanced academic experiences. Further, the organization received a Google Global Impact Award, secured the first-ever state-level commitments to fully reflect student diversity and talent at the highest levels of our K-12 schools, and inspired national coalitions of funders, non-profits, schools, and the U.S. Department of Education to bring greater attention and effort to an agenda of excellence for historically under-served and under-estimated students.

Prior to starting Equal Opportunity Schools, Reid coached soccer and cross-county running, and taught history, economics, philosophy and psychology at a large, rural high school in South Carolina. He also headed the Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs at a school that grew to the largest IB program in the state. It was there he found a relatively simple, high-impact reform that could enhance learning opportunities for “missing students” across the country. He committed to ensure that no student in the school would be overlooked for participation in AP or IB because of the color of their skin or the size of their parents’ paycheck. That reform effort seeded Equal Opportunity Schools.

Reid is a respected writer and researcher on education. His summa cum laude thesis at Harvard, Our 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. It was awarded the Hoopes Prize for excellence. Reid also authored a paper for the Education Trust about the missing students problem. He received Stanford’s only 2010 Social Innovation Fellowship, was recognized by NewSchools Venture Fund as Entrepreneur of the Year, and is a Draper Richards Kaplan and an Echoing Green Fellow.

At Harvard College, Reid earned his degree in Government as well as his teacher’s certification, and he has a Masters in Education and a Masters in Business Administration with a certificate in Public Administration from Stanford University.

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