Jonah Edelman

Jonah Edelman is co-founder and has served as Executive Officer of Stand for Children since its founding in 1996.

Under his leadership, Stand for Children is a unique catalyst for educational equity and racial justice. The organization’s eight state affiliates (AZ, CO, IL, IN, LA, OR, TN, and WA) help children at the bottom of the economic ladder to rise up, through effective dropout prevention strategies, expanded career technical education, and improved college preparation and post-secondary guidance. Stand for Children also focuses on increasing access to quality early childhood education, improving literacy instruction and interventions, increasing funding equity and adequacy, and improving school quality in communities with a concentration of chronically low-performing schools.

Stand for Children achieves scaled impact through championing evidence-based policies and targeted investments; ensuring the policies and investments championed reach the classroom and help children, and are sustained over time; empowering families to effectively support and advocate for their children’s education; and electing candidates to school boards, state legislature, and other key offices who will support priority solutions. Under Edelman's guidance, the organization has been instrumental in the passage of key laws to improve public schools in six states: Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Washington. Moreover, Stand for Children has a notable 85% success rate in electing state legislative candidates, with campaign volunteers reaching 55,000 targeted voters in four states during the 2010 elections.

In addition, Stand for Children operates several programs that directly support educators and students, including the Center for High School Success, which supports educators in more than 150 high schools to increase the rate of ninth graders who finish that make-or-break year on track, Stand’s Teach Kindness program, which provides high quality kindness-building lessons to educators across the country, and the new Center for Early Literacy Success, led by world-renowned early literacy expert, Dr. Nell Duke.

Edelman’s commitment to children began during his college years, when he taught a six-year-old bilingual child to read and went on to found a mentorship program for middle school students. He also served as an administrator of Leadership Education and Athletics in Partnership (LEAP), an enrichment program for children living in public housing.

He graduated from Yale University and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning master's and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in politics. Recognized on Time.com as one of the nation’s top eleven education activists in 2011, Edelman continues to be a prominent voice in discussions about the future of public education in the United States and education reform and innovation.