Jenny Zapf co-founded the world’s first MSEd and MSEd-MBA in Education Entrepreneurship at Penn GSE and the Wharton School and runs a Global Certificate in Education Innovation, a Global Impact Fellowship and an Education Prize at Penn. Over three decades, she has trained thousands of education and business leaders on education innovation, provided advisory support to projects in more than 30 countries and spoken around the globe on cultivating entrepreneurial thinking in education. Denise Abulafia is an Entrepreneur in Residence for Penn’s Education Entrepreneurship MSEd-MBA and Global Certificate programs. A neuroscientist and edtech entrepreneur, she has spent 15 years building startups in the U.S., Mexico and Argentina while advising ventures and corporations across Latin America. As a member of the Ibero-American Association of Edtech, she maps regional innovation and promotes solutions with real-world impact. Through this interview, Zapf and Abulafia highlight how education innovation grows when entrepreneurial thinking is paired with an equity-first lens, a research mindset and learners' lived realities worldwide. Building Education with Purpose and Access At Penn GSE, we are committed to learner access and equity. That is why we built the first global certificates, fellowships and funds in education entrepreneurship. Our goal was simple: to open doors to people around the world who could not commit to a full-year and full-cost program on campus but who needed the tools to create change at scale in their own communities.

For many students, learning to read and write begins in elementary school. But as they move into middle and high school, reading becomes more about absorbing content than developing literacy skills. The shift leaves many behind as they struggle to keep up with academic demands. This gap in secondary literacy instruction is what inspired Jonathan LeMaster and Lee Ramsey to establish Literacy Geeks. Combining LeMaster’s expertise in education with Ramsey’s background in computer science, Literacy Geeks is transforming the way students in grades 6–12 learn to read and write. The company bridges the literacy gap in secondary education by providing explicit and skill-based instruction. Close Reading Comprehension Strategies LeMaster and Ramsey recognized a persistent pattern in school teachers. While elementary school teachers often have a strong literacy background, secondary educators tend to focus more on content. “In secondary education, teachers are specialists in their subject but many are not equipped to teach students the skills needed to truly understand and engage with texts,” says LeMaster. Research supports this claim. As students move past elementary grades, they often struggle to adapt to more complex reading tasks. By middle school, it is no longer about learning to read but reading to learn. Here, the gap between students who are proficient and those who are struggling widens. Explicit literacy instruction is crucial at this stage..

Every parent and educator wants schools to be places where learning thrives and students feel safe. Yet across the U.S., that vision is challenged by a persistent and deeply unsettling reality: school shootings. Communities recognize the urgency, and parents demand stronger safeguards, but decision-making inside schools often oscillates between bureaucracy and budgets. The result is a gap between intent and action, leaving students vulnerable and trust frayed. Guardian bridges that gap through solutions built on decades of defense and aerospace innovation, adapted with the mission of protecting students before danger reaches the classroom. For president, Dr. Timothy Childs, that mission is deeply personal. As a parent of a college student who survived a school shooting, he knows firsthand the profound and lasting impact such events have on families, friends and communities. He says, “School violence demands urgent action, and we are committed to preventing tragedies to keep children safe and secure with our technology.” This personal conviction fuels Guardian’s use of over 25 years of military-grade security expertise to create an advanced threat detection and alert system designed to prevent school shootings. A Silent Sentinel at the Threshold The system operates discreetly to protect student and community privacy. Using radar and vision, it identifies both visible and concealed weapons and can recognize known perpetrators through a secure database. It can also scan up to 400 feet away, stream live images or video of threats and operate without the perpetrator realizing they have been identified..