John Zitzner became a successful entrepreneur in the 1980s, when his software company made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing companies.

After selling his company to Xerox in the late '90s, however, he decided to apply his business skills to a good cause. He created E City, a nonprofit organization that teaches entrepreneurship and life skills to urban youth. Yet after seeing first-hand the educational challenges that his students faced, he decided to start a school. In 2006 he co-founded E Prep, a high-performing charter middle school.

Two years ago, the serial entrepreneur took the next step by launching Village Prep, a tuition-free public charter elementary school.

At last week's sold out TEDxCLE event at the Capitol Theatre, Zitzner told the capacity crowd that high-performing charter schools are needed across the city of Cleveland to provide an alternative to poor-performing public schools. "Our job is to make sure that every student graduates from high school and college," he said.

Zitzner also announced plans to expand the network of high-performing charter schools in Cleveland. Breakthrough Schools, a coalition of several high-performing charter schools, hopes to create 20 new schools by 2020. This would allow Breakthrough to serve about 7,000 students, or 20 percent of the K-8 school children in Cleveland.

It won't be easy, Zitzner said, because charter schools must raise millions of philanthropic dollars each year. "State charter school laws are discriminatory because they dictate that we receive no local property taxes, or one-third less funding than Cleveland Municipal School District schools that are failing," he said. "We need to change the law so that charter schools receive local property taxes."

Source: John Zitzner
Writer: Lee Chilcote