For Jenn Charlot, Learning Starts With Agency
Updated: Oct 8
Jenn Charlot has spent her career designing learning around what Black students already bring: knowledge, identity, curiosity, agency, and the capacity to shape the world around them.
As a first-generation Haitian American and former district and school leader in New York City and Newark, Jenn has seen firsthand what becomes possible when learning connects to purpose, identity, and the issues students care about.
Today, she puts that experience into practice through RevX, a national design lab transforming K–12 education through learning rooted in identity, purpose, and community impact.
Learning Built Around Students’ Power
Co-founded by Jenn, RevX partners with K–12 schools and educators to redesign learning around real-world challenges, cultural relevance, and student leadership.
Its DEEDS framework guides scholars through Discovering, Examining, Engineering, Doing, and Sharing, taking them from identifying issues that matter to their communities to researching them, developing solutions alongside educators and industry partners, and putting their ideas into action. Along the way, students build the agency, critical thinking, and skills to act on what they know.
The model is already moving beyond a single classroom or school. More than 350 educators have adopted RevX tools, reaching approximately 7,000 students nationwide.
At LEAD359, RevX’s flagship public school in the Bronx, Black and Brown students are achieving:
proficiency in English language arts
proficiency in math and science
Together, these efforts reflect RevX’s approach: building learning from the knowledge, history, and lived realities Black students already bring, and creating opportunities for young people to use what they learn to shape their communities.
Building Beyond What's Already Working
The $1 million Luminary Award meets Jenn and RevX at a time of momentum. The model is working, educators are leveraging their tools, and students are demonstrating what becomes possible when purpose, identity, and academic depth are designed together.
Over three years, the award creates room to build from that strength through organizational and leadership assessments, personalized coaching, wellness and sustainability support, and opportunities to learn alongside and from a community of leaders.
For Jenn, the next chapter is about carrying a proven approach further: sharpening the model, strengthening the systems around it, and expanding RevX’s influence on how schools design learning rooted in identity and agency.
She brings that same orientation to The 1954 Network: a willingness to test, learn, share what works, and contribute lessons from building alongside Black students and communities.
RevX has already shown what this kind of learning can look like. Jenn is building toward how much further it can go.
The 2026 Luminaries
Five leaders and organizations building across the educational continuum, from early childhood through adulthood.
