Amar Kumar & Dr. Danilo Petranovich, Moderated by Kerry McDonald
Welcome to 2023!
Despite the education system's shortcomings, particularly over the past several years, Kerry McDonald has reason to be optimistic about the future of education. She makes the case that the three “E’s” of Empowerment, Exit, and Entrepreneurship set the stage for a better future for students and families.
We want to kick off the new year by sharing a conversation with Amar Kumar, Founder of Kai Pod Learning, Dr. Danilo Petranovich, Director of the Abigail Adams Institute, and Kerry McDonald, Senior Education Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Amar Kumar
Amar Kumar is an education entrepreneur who is passionate about making learning more personal, more social, and more engaging. He is the founder of KaiPod Learning, where small group learning is paired with online schools or homeschool curriculum to deliver a new type of learning experience. In his past experience, Amar was the Chief Product Officer for Pearson's Online K-12 division. He has also been a school teacher and a principal at a high-needs rural school in India.
Dr. Danilo Petranovich
Dr. Petranovich is the Director of the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is a scholarly enterprise which provides supplementary humanistic education to the Harvard intellectual community by exploring questions of deep human concern that cut across the boundaries of academic disciplines. Throughout the year, we provide a range of programming for Harvard and other Boston area university students, as well as Cambridge and Boston area young professionals, including reading and discussion groups, workshops, lectures, conversations with faculty, intellectual retreats, and mentoring.
Previously, Dr. Petranovich taught political science at Duke University and Yale University. His scholarly expertise is in nineteenth century European and American political and social thought.
Kerry McDonald
Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor.
Kerry's research interests include homeschooling and schooling alternatives, self-directed learning, education entrepreneurship, parent empowerment, school choice, and family and child policy. Her articles have appeared at The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NPR, Education Next, Reason Magazine, City Journal, and Entrepreneur, and the Journal of School Choice, among others. She has a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Bowdoin College.
Kerry lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can follow her work at fee.org/kerry or on Twitter @kerry_edu.