Growing up in middle-class comfort, Reid was alarmed by the way his life so diverged from that of his best friend, Jamie. They used to laugh together in class, but were separated by a hallway when Reid enrolled in advanced classes. After graduation, the two moved further apart, as Reid pursued an elite degree studying educational opportunity in America.
Determined to pay forward his good fortune, Reid became a teacher at an underresourced South Carolina high school where efforts to serve the students were stymied by internal segregation and administrative ambivalence. He was quickly disabused of the Hollywood myth that a good teacher could simply save the day, and each false start with his students forced him to reckon with all that he didn't know. Ultimately, a student project to create one positive change became the launchpad for Reid's own professional awakening.
While individual efforts are no match against systems of educational inequality, Reid learned firsthand that a community of people powered by data can effect change. This lesson motivated Reid to found Equal Opportunities Schools (EOS), a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to finding the students overlooked, discouraged, or otherwise missing from higher-level learning opportunities.
As EOS became more successful, partnering with major philanthropies, universities, and even the White House, Reid once again grappled with his role as a leader. Only through the efforts of, first, his students in South Carolina, and later his team at EOS, would he come to understand, and begin to overcome, the limitations of his vision. Informed by immense new data on educational opportunity in America, The Kid Across the Hall is a powerful story of learning and unlearning; of leading and, ultimately, following.
About the Author: Reid Saaris is Founder of Equal Opportunity Schools, a nonprofit whose mission is to ensure that students of color and low-income students have equitable access to America's most academically intense high school programs. Formerly a high school teacher and administrator, Reid continues to write and research about educational justice.
