'It's in the Country's Best Interest for Poor Folks to Be Smart'

Gene Wade, 31
Chairman and CEO, LearnNow
New York, NY

Gene Wade, now 31, vividly recalls lunchtime on his first day of grade school. Not because that's when he made his first trade of PB&J for bologna or when he got to show off his dodge-ball prowess. Rather, that's when he saw all the kids look around to see who got placed in the "green" reading group (you know, the group for kids who couldn't read as well as their peers could). By the end of lunchtime, the students learned that "green" was code for "kids who can't learn." "It's educational malpractice to tell children that they can't learn," Wade says. "But that's what our schools do every day to poor children and to minority children."

That's not only bad education, Wade says -- it's bad business. "For the first time, it's in this country's interest for poor folks to be smart and well educated," he says, almost jumping out of his chair in his Wall Street-area office. He's visibly agitated, gesturing with passion, darting looks out the window, and adjusting his monogrammed shirtsleeves as he searches for his words. "There's an overwhelming demand for people who are smart, but our educational system just isn't built to make everybody smart. It's built to stratify people into the hierarchical, unthinking jobs of the industrial economy. And those jobs are gone."

Long before the term "digital divide" entered the contemporary lexicon, Wade had been trying to connect schools to the new knowledge economy by doing more than just plopping computers into a few classrooms. He sees schools as powerful catalysts for community economic development and as incubators of human talent for the growing information-technology industry. So he started LearnNow, a company that's building a network of charter schools with decidedly suburban traits -- parent involvement, stellar scores, new facilities -- in economically distressed neighborhoods.

Many of those neighborhoods look like the place where Wade was raised: the housing projects of Roxbury, a predominantly black, mostly low-income neighborhood in Boston. Few of his playmates back then talked about careers. Although he attended a stellar Boston high school, Wade admits that he didn't try hard to get beyond the bottom of his class. But thanks to a community group's eleventh-hour attempt to improve his performance, he entered a leadership course that changed his life. The course taught him a simple, but stunning, lesson: Smartness isn't something that's determined at birth or by a teacher. It's something that you can attain as readily as anyone else. But with that opportunity for achievement came a huge responsibility: He couldn't use his neighborhood or his race as an excuse for placing at the bottom of the class.

He went on to attend Morehouse College, and then made a name for himself at Harvard Law School and at the Wharton School as the "education guy." While other students started IPO clubs, he started education clubs. He lobbied people to help him build the enterprise that eventually became LearnNow. A culture of high achievement and no excuses is strong at the company, especially because the backgrounds of the senior-management team are so similar to the backgrounds of the children whom they hope to influence. "I'm not asking any kid to do anything that I haven't done," Wade says, almost as a challenge to students and to educators alike.

He knows the statistics of low performance by heart -- and they're stark: Only 1,400 black seniors nationwide scored from 3 to 5 (which is generally considered passing) on the Advanced Placement test for basic calculus, according to the Educational Testing Service's 1999 summary report. That's just 1.3% of all students who took that test. "This means that we've all failed, whether we're charter schools, public schools, or private schools," Wade says. "The burden of proof needs to shift from kids to grown folks."

Wade isn't an educator himself. He's a classic entrepreneur who turned down lucrative careers in corporate law and in investment banking to pursue a social -change dream that he had been nursing since he graduated from high school. Now it doesn't seem like such a far-out dream, given the country's insatiable demand for skilled labor and for technical talent -- and given education's prominent place in the national political dialogue, and among the leaders of the dotcom business sector.

Wade's strategy involves taking the long route to address the pet issue of dotcom-ers turned social activists. But he hasn't lost backers because of it. LearnNow's list of investors and advisers sound like a Who's Who of Digital America: John Doerr and his New Schools Venture Fund; Michael Milken and his Knowledge Universe holding company; Rudy Crew, former chancellor of the New York City Schools; Lorraine Monroe, founding principal of Harlem's Frederick Douglass Academy; and Kent Amos, president and founder of the Urban Family Institute.