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Sam Walton's granddaughter has plans to fix public education in America (profile of Carrie Walton Penner, MA ’97)

December 9, 2014
Forbes
Carrie Walton Penner, MA ’97, offers a vision of where the charter school movement is heading; it includes a new focus on accountability for underperforming charter schools.
By 
Luisa Kroll

A vision for the future of education sits within a converted church in the heart of a working-class neighborhood in northern Houston, abutted by auto parts stores and a heat treatment plant. At YES Prep North Central, homogeneity reigns: Of the 953 middle and high schoolers at the 11-year-old charter school, 96% are Hispanic, and a similarly large majority live at or below the poverty line. The kids are dressed the same–blue or khaki pants with school-issued polo shirts. But most important, their outcomes are uniform, too: 100% of graduates get into a four-year college, as the university pennants lining the hallways suggest.

Gliding into the school, 44-year-old Carrie Walton Penner sticks out from the students–older, blonder and, in jeans and a black wrap jacket, more polished than the young collegiate uniforms she weaves through. She’s also the granddaughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, the daughter of current company chairman Rob Walton, an heir to the largest family fortune, to the tune of $165 billion, in the entire world. And as the family’s point person on education issues, she’s arguably the most powerful force in the charter school movement. “How long is the longest-serving teacher?” she asks the school director, amid a flurry of questions. “Is there step-up pay and pay for performance?”

Anything to do with charter schools is a political lightning rod right now. As is pretty much anything to do with Wal-Mart and the family that controls the world’s largest retailer. Until now the personable Penner has been hesitant to speak up. Her conversations with FORBES make up her first extensive media interview, and she speaks with the careful deliberateness of one of her charter school English teachers. Listen carefully, though, and you get a clear vision of the charter school movement over the next five years and her place in it, something that she’s been working toward, both consciously and unwittingly, over the past two decades. YES Prep North Central is an appropriate place to begin that conversation. Ranked the fourth-best high school in Texas and 28th in the country by U.S. News & World Report, it represents everything that’s great about charters. Namely that all children, no matter their circumstances, can succeed when they attend the right school.

“We’ve always had a strategy and theory for change,” she says. “The current plan has been to have a new supply of high-performing, mostly charters, for parents to choose from.”

Read the complete story in Forbes.

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