Greater Kansas City Metro Area

The K12 Fellowship is LEANLAB Education’s startup accelerator program based in Kansas City, MO, designed to foster the growth of transformation K12 education innovations that address achievement gaps and inequities that persist in public education.

The most transformational education innovations are born when they are developed in true partnership with those most impacted by education--parents, students, administrators, and teachers. Participants in the K12 Fellowship are selected because they can specifically address the challenges surfaced by schools, parents, and students in needs assessments (2017 and 2018). They offer a range of solutions and come from a range of backgrounds, but they have certain key elements in common.

• EXPERIENCE - They have a deep understanding of the K12 sector and have lived experience with the problem they are trying to solve.
• URGENCY - Their solutions tackling education’s most pressing problems and not just a “nice to have.”.
• TECHNOLOGY - Founders leverage technology to augment the capabilities of teachers, not work to replace them. They are designed to empower the user to be more efficient, creative, or focused.
• EQUITY - Their solutions are geared toward addressing the chronic racial and socioeconomic problems that students are facing every day.. 
• SCALE - Their ventures have the potential to maximize impact, starting with reaching the more than 100,000 students in LEANLAB’s school network.
• UNIQUENESS - They are designing truly innovative solutions to endemic problems, based on their unique perspectives and experiences.
• TRACTION - They have clear early evidence that their ventures are having a positive impact for teachers and students.

During the fellowship, entrepreneurs are matched with educators from LEANLAB’s school pilot network whose needs are addressed by their innovation. They then co-design a pilot study with their partner school and a researcher in order to measure the impact of their innovation within a real classroom.

In this process, entrepreneurs act on direct feedback from school communities as they refine their solution with a dedicated end-user (e.g. teacher, administrator, or instructional coach) in a real-world environment. As part of the process, they also conduct a research study influenced by Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR), under the guidance of an experienced researcher and their school end-user. In addition, early-stage founders are also given a range of other immersive and intensive support, designed to measure each venture’s impact in education and maximize its business viability.