UNDERSTANDING AI By Ilene Rosenthal AI won’t save education – putting students first will Let me start with a number that broke my heart—and built my company. 46% Nearly half of children in the United States enter kindergarten at risk of failure. Not because they aren’t brilliant. Not because their families don’t love them. But because nobody reached them before they walked through that kindergarten door. When I read that statistic from the Kellogg Foundation, I could not stop thinking about it. How is it that the richest country in the world is failing so many children so early? What if we got there first? What if a child’s very first encounter with learning was joyful, successful, and happened at home even before they were enrolled in school? Those questions became Footsteps2Brilliance. And they still drive me every day. From a software company to a movement When my co-founder and I started talking to educational leaders, we asked one simple question: Why don’t we do more for children before they start school? Every single leader gave us the same answer: “We have no jurisdiction over children until they walk through our doors.” That answer became our founding insight. We created Footsteps2Brilliance to bring entire communities together— schools, families, libraries, and local organizations—to reach the most vulnerable families and their children even before they enrolled in school. This was something that had never been done before. Through our collective impact approach, we partner with superintendents, mayors, and community leaders to provide bilingual literacy resources to every family from birth through eighth grade. Using the devices families already own, we deliver thousands of books, songs, and games grounded in the Science of Reading. We meet families where they are before the education system traditionally begins. Because here’s the reality: 90% of brain development happens before age five. Waiting until kindergarten is simply too late. And when we start earlier, the outcomes change dramatically. Students using our program just 45 minutes a week triple their literacy gains. But the most powerful results aren’t just academic. They’re human. Parents and children walk into schools with confidence for the first time, not because of a test score, but because they’ve been given the tools to learn and grow together in their own language, on a device already in their hands. That’s when we realized that Footsteps2Brilliance wasn’t just a product—it was a movement. What legacy really means As an entrepreneur, I care deeply about building a business. But I care even more about building a legacy. Legacy is not a product, a valuation, or a line on a pitch deck. Legacy is what happens after you leave the room. It is the life you change that changes another life. I see it in stories like these: Viviana Lopez-De Campos is a Pre-K teacher who has been working in Bridgeport, Connecticut with bilingual students for fifteen years. One of her students came from a Venezuelan family who spoke only Spanish. Using our bilingual curriculum, the family learned alongside their daughter. At the parent-teacher conference, the mother walked in speaking English for the first time. Viviana was moved to tears. Then there is Abigail, a sevenyear-old with autism who had never read a sentence. Her mother Beth had spent years searching for something, anything, that would reach her daughter. Within weeks of using Footsteps2Brilliance, Beth looked up to hear Abigail reading actual sentences out loud, confidently, with joy. She grabbed her phone and hit record. Ten months later, Abigail stood in front of her entire second-grade class and read a book aloud. Abigail now asks every day: “Can I play my book game?” That is legacy. That child. That family. Those moments multiplied across nearly two million students. enterprising Women 47 PeopleImages / Shutterstock.com
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