Championing educational and economic opportunity
As a teen attending public schools in Norwalk, Connecticut, Ben Wallerstein often engaged in lively dinner table discussions about education with his educator parents. Why, he asked, did his father, an art teacher, have so many Apple computers in his classroom in an affluent school, when his own school “on the other side of the tracks” had just a few basic computers for use by the entire student body?
Today, Wallerstein, a 1999 graduate of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, does more than talk about education. He is at the forefront of improving it as the co-founder and CEO of Whiteboard Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-based social impact consulting firm working at the intersection of education and economic mobility.
“My role has two parts,” he said. “I provide services to clients and coach and support the Whiteboard employees who provide those services. We conduct original research, write articles, draft legislation and public policy, and devise advocacy strategies.
“The other part of the job is that I’m a CEO of a company of almost 50 employees with a responsibility to foster collaboration and teamwork. I’m increasingly falling back on my Jepson experience, which exposed me to organizational theory and behavior and leadership ethics. I could not have concocted a more perfect undergraduate experience.”
Recently, the alum worked on a campaign to promote the re-entry of previously incarcerated individuals into the workforce. “Our education system does a terrible job when it comes to unlocking the potential of kids who make bad decisions and run into legal problems,” he said. “We lose out on a massive amount of human capital as a result.”
Also recently, Whiteboard Advisors teamed up with the nonprofit Opportunity@Work on “Tear the Paper Ceiling,” a campaign to eliminate college degree requirements for many jobs. “If we care about equal opportunity and economic mobility, we should not create artificial hurdles for people’s participation in higher-wage jobs,” Wallerstein argued.
“Issues of racial and economic disparities in education have been front and center in my consciousness from a young age,” he said, adding that he embraced the opportunities to explore these issues at the Jepson School. In particular, he recalled former leadership studies professor Richard Couto, describing him as a proponent of action research who sent his students into the field to learn while working to effect positive change in communities.
A year after graduating from the University of Richmond, Wallerstein enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center, while simultaneously starting a full-time job as a receptionist at the D.C.-based bipartisan lobbying firm Dutko.
“Cabinet members were coming in and out of the office, and here I was, a law student who was passionate about education, technology, and innovation,” he said. “I asked if I could build out an education practice. After realizing that I was likely the worst receptionist they’d ever had — the coffee was always cold and the conference room was often double booked — they gave me the go-ahead.”
By the time he finished law school, he had built an education practice at Dutko and stayed on as the company’s counsel and a vice president. Dutko was sold to a publicly traded company in 2009. In 2016, Wallerstein and his colleague Anna Kimsey Edwards led a management buyout of Whiteboard Advisors, which they sold to the Strada Education Foundation in 2020.
Today, Wallerstein continues to lead the firm and has earned a reputation as a thought leader in the education sector. His research and commentary have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, TechCrunch, EdSurge, VentureBeat, and the Huffington Post, among others. In 2022, Washingtonian magazine named him to its annual list of the nation’s most influential leaders in education.
“For a long time, I was a worker who hired other people to help do the work,” he said, reflecting on his trajectory. “But at some point, I needed to become a leader.”