Richard Whitmire

Personal history: my last real day job was as an editorial writer for USA Today. After leaving the newspaper my first book was about the boys dilemma. The conventional wisdom at the time, that girls were having a hard time in school, turned out to be false, and my research into the issue resulted in Why Boys Fail.

Former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee wrote the foreword for Why Boys Fail and soon after the book came out I approached her about cooperating for a biography. She agreed, giving a green light for me to talk to her family, friends and work associates. The result was The Bee Eater.

Next I wrote a book with the College Board about which school districts and school leaders were doing the best job educating low-income students: Achieving the Dream. One chapter in that book was about Rocketship charter schools, which led to On The Rocketship, which is about high performing charter schools trying to reach more students now attending lousy schools. The next: The Founders, a book about the origins of the high performing charters, and now, The B.A. Breakthrough, which draws on many of the lessons learned by the founders.