McGraw Winners leading the way, and in the news

McGraw Prize winners’ impact continues long after they have taken their statue home. 

Reshma Saujani, Anant Agarwal, Sal Kahn, and Timothy Renick recently made headlines for their work on AI in education, expanding access to college, and supporting women in the workplace. 

Learn more about their continued work:

Reshma Saujani, 2018 Winner

Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, recently discussed her book "Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work" with ABC News. She addressed the challenges working women and mothers face and highlighted the need for workplace reforms to support women's success.

“I wrote ‘Pay Up’ because I really realized I could teach millions of girls to code, but if I didn't help their mothers, I had not solved gender equality,” Saujani told ABC. “And for so long, we tell women that you need to be fixed. You need more confidence. You have to power post, just get a mentor and everything will be fine. And that is a lie because 80% of women at some point in their career will become a mother. And you realize that living in a nation that doesn't have paid leave, that doesn't have affordable child care, the structural supports that we need to not just survive but thrive are not there.”

Anant Agarwal, 2016 Winner

The co-founder of edX wrote an essay for the New York Times offering educators a reason to embrace AI in the classroom: Because it can inspire a love of learning.

“It’s natural to worry about change. The unknown often feels like a threat,” Agarwal wrote. “But history has taught us an undeniable lesson: Instinctually building walls to protect ourselves only delays the inevitable. Those walls will be climbed, and they will fall. Adaptability, not defense, is the greatest skill we can have to stay relevant in a constantly evolving world.”

Sal Khan, 2012 Winner

The founder of Khan Academy gave 60 Minutes a look at his latest venture. Khanmigo is an AI-powered tutor that Khan says is designed to help students learn and teachers teach.

While some worry that AI might diminish the role of teachers, Khan told Anderson Cooper he sees this as a way to create more connections in the classroom.

"The hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection," Khan said.

Timothy Renick, 2018 Winner

In January, the U.S. Department of Education recognized Georgia State University with its first-ever Trailblazer Award, for “the university’s success in increasing graduation rates through data-driven, evidence-based interventions and its impact on the field of student success nationally."

The department celebrated Renick, who leads Georgia State’s National Institute for Student Success.

In announcing the award, the department said: “Led by Tim Renick, NISS has already partnered with more than 100 institutions and several university systems collectively serving over a million students in the last three years. The results have been promising so far: increases in retention rates for the first cohort of schools working with the NISS were four times higher than the national average.”