Who we are
The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank devoted to studying and promoting excellence in education. Our primary publication, Education Progress, aims to unite various pro-excellence voices from across the educational landscape.
At Education Progress, we reject the one-size-fits-all model that has dominated American education for half a century, instead embracing a vision where every student can advance as far and as fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. Through research, policy advocacy, and community building, we work to create educational environments that foster genuine excellence, not by pretending all students learn the same way at the same pace, but by meeting each student where they are and enabling them to soar.
Our work spans from early childhood development to advanced academic acceleration, from classroom discipline to cognitive science, centered around a common mission: to understand how humans learn and excel, and to build systems that let them do so without artificial constraints.
- 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 Managing Editor
David is the managing editor for the Education Progress Substack and has written on K–12 policy debates and ideologies driving regressive ideas in American education. He earned his MA in philosophy from Georgia State University, where he taught critical thinking, and his BA in philosophy at Vanderbilt University; his studies focused on Friedrich Nietzsche, metaethics, and moral psychology.
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.
Robyn Gausman-Burnett Research Fellow
Robyn Gausman-Burnett is a Doctoral Research Fellow with CEP and a PhD candidate in Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. Drawing on more than 17 years of experience as a K–12 educator, her research examines how geography, school systems, family and community conditions, and educational measurement shape student performance, district outcomes, and postsecondary workforce preparedness. Her current work develops new ways to study how the influence of schools and other institutions changes across places and over time, while preserving the local detail often lost in larger administrative boundaries. She applies this approach to longitudinal education data to better understand educational opportunity and its relationship to later academic and workforce outcomes.
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.
The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 33-2563070.
General: contact@educationprogress.org
Press & expert requests: Thomas Briggs, thomas@educationprogress.org
Community: the CEP Discord