Congratulations to the 2025 Yass Prize Contenders
Congratulations to the Texas Education Freedom Award Winners
Follow the Impact
Learn about the Impact of the Yass Prize
Discover the story of the Yass Prize, an initiative dedicated to celebrating, rewarding, and expanding innovative education providers. Explore our history and the last impact of these groundbreaking efforts.
Power of Innovation
Summit 2025 &
Yass Prize Awards
Innovation is the engine of American progress — and nowhere is it more urgently needed than in education. The Summit explores how today’s boldest educators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are reimagining what’s possible for learners across the nation. Through the lens of the Yass Prize’s four pillars — Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless — we’ll highlight the people, programs and policymakers proving that when innovation meets freedom, students, families, and communities flourish.
Bi-weekly news brief about our Nation’s Best Education Leaders
Innovators in Action: Yass Prize Alumni Featured on Forbes.com
Timely, thought-provoking, relevant content from Yass Prize alumni contributors on Forbes.com: Explore how innovation, opportunity, and freedom are reshaping education. Learn more about the real-world impact of the STOP principles in action.
Latest News
23 Education Providers Vie for Coveted $1,000,000 Yass Prize
Yass Prize Alumni Awarded Over $4 million to Expand Education Opportunity in Texas
Janine and Jeff Yass Speak at the Emerging School Models Conference at Harvard University
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.
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?
The Yass Prize process has created an awareness of the education freedom movement within churches and communities.
It's given us an opportunity to start critical discussions with our congregations, parents, community leaders and members, about the laws that govern education in Pennsylvania.
Our newest endeavor – that was part of our Yass Prize initiative – we're bringing career and technical education into the school
I'm in the process of going through the construction of a 20,000 square foot $11.5 million dollar building dedicated to career and technical education for the students in the Philadelphia region.
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.
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.
The Yass Prize has brought together such diverse leaders
from all different demographics, all different states, all different service provider types that you can learn from.
Yass brought us together, creating opportunities to create an educational universe within which we can look at education differently…
we have to find academic experiences that represent neuro-divergent learners, kids who want to learn about gaming, who want to do stuff online, who dropped out of school.
It might be the first time you’re speaking where everyone is actually listening and cares about what you’re doing.
I don’t think I’ve been in a room as supportive as the Yass Prize Semifinalist room in Miami.
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.
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.
If you're committed to wanting to be one of the change makers of the future in education, I believe that this is a place for you.
Not only because of the capital, but because of the knowledge that comes by communing with the diverse group of people as opposed to everybody that thinks the exact same way that you might think.
Because of the Yass Prize, we were able to add an additional pre-K classroom.