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education in the United States will not be equally fortunate. Today, Agassi’s goal is to give those children a choice: a better life facilitated by the opportunity to have a better education and the power to choose their own path.
world, Agassi hit rock bottom. After losing in the first round of an indoor tournament in Germany, his coach gave him an ultimatum: start over or quit tennis forever. But as it turns out, it was not tennis itself that Agassi truly resented, but the feeling of being trapped in a life he did not choose. At that moment, Agassi made the decision to choose tennis, finally allowing himself to accept the bad and embrace all the good that came with his career. “Looking back now in hindsight, I’m quite grateful for the path that I went down. It’s taught me a lot, and it’s given me an incredible platform. It gave me the ability to have my foundation. It gave me the ability to take care of my family,” he explained. Most profoundly, tennis gave Agassi a second chance. Without a proper education, Agassi had no choice in the path he took early in life. Years later, when he could finally accept tennis, Agassi had an incredible career to fall back on as well as many opportunities to fulfill other passions in his life. But the millions of children growing up without access to quality
Breaking Down Barriers In February 2001, construction broke at 1201 West Lake Mead Boulevard in Las Vegas on a project to build a new charter school—the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. The Agassi Foundation was going to build its own school. It was a huge risk. Nevada had one of the worst drop out rates in the country: for every 100 students entering ninth grade, only 50 would be expected to graduate high school and only 10 from college. Agassi, himself a high school dropout, set out to learn everything he could about best practices in education and policy. “When I first got into education, the first thing I had to do was learn about our state’s charter school laws to make sure we had a platform to succeed. It was about reaching out to local legislators and putting people around me who could fight and push up these battles, all the while fundraising, all the while being clear on my mission, all the while communicating that mission,” he said. Agassi’s plans took an unexpected turn when he learned that a component of charter school law directly interfered with that mission. “When I built the school, it was in the poorest and most economically challenged area in the whole town. The last problem that I ever thought I would run into was people from the suburbs commuting to go, because it was a complete lottery,” he said. In the United States, charter schools do not receive public funds to build or maintain their facilities, but they do receive “head” funds (a certain amount of money per student) and therefore are subject to several of the same rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to public schools. Therefore, when enrollment is over-subscribed, admission is allocated based
GOLDEN SLAM During his 21-year pro career, Agassi won 60 singles titles, including 8 Grand Slam championships, and an Olympics Gold Medal. His opponents nicknamed him "The Punisher".
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on an open lottery. “That was an issue for me, because there are a lot of children who have more than others,” Agassi said. “…I had to backtrack. I had to fight for legislation that gave a logistical lottery so that the student body was representative of the children that the foundation was focused on helping and reflective of the community that it existed in.” Agassi and his foundation began lobbying for reform right away, but it did not come in time. In August 2001, Agassi Prep opened its doors to 150 elementary school students selected by an open lottery, and the same occurred when the middle school building opened in 2003. “So now, all of a sudden, what percentage of the kids I was trying to help were actually going to be the ones that were being helped?” Agassi said. Throughout this ordeal, Agassi was simultaneously “starting over” in his tennis career, traveling 38 weeks a year to play tournaments around the world. “I didn’t have the luxury of a lot of time. I was trying to be the best in the world at something at the same time. My heart and passions collided with my circumstances and limitations,” he said. In his professional life, Agassi was climbing back to the top of the tennis world, winning the US Open and French Open in 1999, becoming only the third male player in the Open Era to win all four Gram Slam singles titles during his career. In 2000 and 2001, Agassi won backto-back Australian Open titles. Things were coming together in his private life as well: in 2001, Agassi was re-married to former tennis player Steffi Graf. Soon after, his son Jaden was born and two years later, his daughter Jaz. When asked how he managed to balance his personal life, career, and charity work, Agassi responded, “In the same way all these students I saw walking around the [Harvard] campus today do. I look at them and I see the same things I was going through constantly. They all look stressed out. I wonder how they do it, you know, but you find a way.” Finally, in 2009, the Nevada Legislature passed SB 391, authorizing charter schools to
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