Corey Scholes

Senior Fellow

As the Director of Education at the Kauffman Foundation, Corey advised on strategic education program initiatives. She helped start the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a public charter school, where she served as interim CEO during the school’s launch. Corey has also developed and executed the foundation’s strategy around attracting, developing, and retaining talent among Kansas City schools. Her team is responsible for bringing programs like City Year, KCTR, and Kansas City Plus to Kansas City to make the talent pipeline more robust and able to support the Foundation’s other K-12 investments. She is the founder of the Amplify conference for educators of color. She helped start the foundations internal race and equity work and helped bring to life Promise 54’s DEI accelerator with an initial investment and strategic support and planning.

Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, she was a school designer for Expeditionary Learning in New York, and taught graduate-level courses for the University of Missouri-Kansas City Department of Education. Earlier, Corey was principal of two schools in Kansas City. She earned her undergraduate degree in economics from Westminster College, and her master’s in curriculum development from DePaul University.

She serves on the school boards of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School (Kansas City) and Compass Academy (Denver). She was the vice chair of Brooklyn Lab Charter school (NYC). 

She also serves on the boards of the National Council of Teacher Residencies, the Fund for Teachers, City Year Kansas City, The Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers and Getting Smart.