JONATHAN K. HAGE

FOUNDER & ECO, CHARTER SCHOOLS USA, FORT LAUDERDALE

A Special Forces/Green Berets veteran educated at the University of Colorado and Georgetown University, Hage founded the family-owned and operated startup Charter Schools USA in 1997. Today, it has 10,000 employees, 81,000 students and nearly 100 schools around the nation. The company says schools it manages “have produced some of the strongest gains in reading, writing, science and math in the nation, especially for minority and low-income students.” Hage was a researcher at the Heritage Foundation before becoming research director at Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future think tank. A policy paper he wrote on charters helped him help draft the Legislature’s charter school law. He began a nonprofit to advise those interested in how to start a school, then started his own company. A “deep-seated belief that every child is born with God-given potential and that every student can learn is the basis for CSUSA’s success,” the company says.