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Campbell, Kenneth

President, Black Alliance for Educational Options

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Kenneth L. Campbell, a founding board member of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), has served as president of the organization since January 2010. Since 2000, BAEO has worked to increase access to high-quality educational options for Black children by supporting parental choice policies and programs that empower low-income and working-class Black families.

Campbell has brought to his current post deep experience and expertise as one of the nation’s foremost authorities on charter schools. Under his leadership, BAEO is focusing on bringing top-performing charter schools to underserved regions of the South and providing greater support for high-quality, Black-led charter schools in key cities across the country.

Previously, Campbell led Louisiana’s charter school efforts as the founding director of charter schools at the Louisiana Department of Education. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he helped engineer the rebuilding of New Orleans’s education infrastructure through charter schools and implemented innovative strategies to transform failing schools across the state into higher performing charter schools.

As director of business development for the second-largest education management company in the United States, Campbell spent six years developing charter schools in urban areas nationwide. He subsequently applied the lessons of our nation’s early charter movement overseas, developing charter schools in Doha, Qatar, as part of the most progressive education reform effort undertaken in the Middle East.

Campbell began his career in education reform in Washington, D.C, helping to secure passage of the District’s landmark charter school law. He later founded the D.C. Charter School Resource Center, which cultivated school founders and leaders and helped to foster an environment where charter schools could succeed.

Campbell is a founding board member of 4.0 Schools – an organization focused on kindling new ideas in education and bringing together smart people who use creative problem solving to develop game changing products, companies, and schools that will transform education in the United States. He also served as a founding board member of Building Excellent Schools, which provides fellowships to help educational entrepreneurs design, build, and maintain excellent schools in underserved communities.

Campbell served in the United States Army and retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a captain in 2005. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Averett College in Virginia and a master’s degree in educational l eadership from Touro University International. He resides near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife and son.