Who we are.
The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) think tank working to reorient American education toward a culture of excellence. For more than fifty years, American schooling has organized itself around a single goal: closing the gaps between students. Hundreds of billions of dollars, three generations of reform, and an entire discipline of education research later, the gaps are still there — and the students who could have gone furthest were quietly left to coast.
We investigate how that happened, and make the case for something better. We publish original journalism and long-form research, build free public tools like our fifty-state database of gifted-education law, draft model policy legislators can actually use, and run academic competitions worth entering. Everything we publish is free to read, free to cite, and open to argument.
Six commitments.
- Excellence should be accessible, and exceptional outcomes are achievable.
- Schools should teach to ability, not age.
- Progress is constrained by interest over intelligence.
- Growth requires measurement.
- Order enables excellence.
- Education serves students first.
People.
Leadership
Jack Despain Zhou Cofounder · Executive Director
Jack founded CEP to orient American education toward a culture of excellence. He writes Tracing Woodgrains, known for investigations including the FAA hiring scandal, and was previously a producer for the podcast Blocked and Reported. He served as an Airborne Chinese Language Analyst in the U.S. Air Force and is a graduate of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.
Thomas Briggs Cofounder · Director of Operations
Thomas is a lawyer and writer who directs CEP’s day-to-day operations and handles press and expert requests. A graduate of UCLA School of Law, he studied philosophy, international politics, and democratic theory before turning to law.
Fellows
David Shuck Senior Fellow
Bio to be written.
Sebastian Garren Senior Fellow
Sebastian’s work at CEP focuses on academic acceleration, gifted education, and academic competitions. He is the Executive Director of Saint John Paul II Preparatory, a classical Catholic hybrid school in the St. Louis area. He has consulted for startup hybrid schools and for edtech firms building digital tutors, and has presented research on education, economics, history, and technology at the Hybrid Schools Conference, the Fitzwilliam Conference on Milton Friedman, and the Emergent Ventures Unconferences in Dublin and DC.
Board & advisors
Erica Frank President, CEP Advisory Board
Erica is a preventive-medicine physician and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Preventive Medicine and Population Health at the University of British Columbia. She founded NextGenU.org, which offers free, accredited health-sciences education in partnership with universities worldwide, and her research on physicians’ own health practices — including the Women Physicians’ Health Study — spans more than 170 peer-reviewed articles.
Joshua Dwyer Advising Director
Josh has worked in Illinois education policy for over a decade. As policy and government affairs director at Empower Illinois, he helped write and pass the Invest in Kids Act, the state’s tax-credit scholarship program, which funded more than 38,000 scholarships; he previously directed education reform at the Illinois Policy Institute. He founded The Excellence Project in 2020 and teaches public policy as an adjunct at Governors State University.
For funders and fact-checkers.
The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 33-2563070. Annual filings will be posted here as they become available.
Reach us.
General: contact@educationprogress.org
Press & expert requests: Thomas Briggs, thomas@educationprogress.org
Community: the CEP Discord