WHY I FOUNDED EEF

It was the early 2000’s. To my students I was just another white guy paid to teach them. (Most of the relatively well-paid faculty and administration were white, but almost all the kids were black or hispanic.) However, 95% of the job was not teaching at all. Rather, it was “classroom management”, the euphemism used for “keeping ‘em in line”.

I was a mercenary. And I was a pawn.

But the most agonizing part of each schoolday was the following frustrating dilemma:

In the back of most of my rowdy classrooms were usually a couple quiet kids who really wanted to learn and were willing to make the effort. But I could really teach these gritty kids only if I could get them 1-to-1. Yet between my “classroom management” during school days, and my desperate next-day-prep late into evenings, I couldn’t consistently meet with them.

And that’s what those gritty kids really needed for their learning: consistency. In struggling to keep my job, I was failing to help them.

After a couple agonizing years, I left that job, returning home to the easy-by-comparison responsibility of caring for a dad struck by Alzheimer’s. (My parents, both engineers, had groomed me to also be an engineer. Thus my educational background in STEM.)

But I kept a toe in teaching, tutoring when I could get out of the house.

I’ve since worked hard at developing my tutoring craft. I've learned that the best tutoring for hard-studying students is to point them in the right direction, then let them take over from there.

Though I didn’t realize it, my tutoring experience was prepping me so that I could finally, though belatedly and indirectly, do right by those gritty NYC kids. After more than 20 subsequent years of tutoring and developing my craft, through EEF I can now make a difference in similar gritty kids’ lives:  helping them help themselves in their challenging journey through to early college, and for premeds, even on to med school.

- Dan Jetter, Founder/Director/AssessmentTutor of EducationEquity Foundation

• Volunteer Tutor/Professor (online MCAT Prep to premeds throughout US and online Chemistry to education-starved young women in Afghanistan)

• Professional Tutor (to AP & College students; earned $150K from 2450 hours of tutoring: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Calculus, and MCAT Prep)

• Trained by Princeton Review to tutor MCAT Prep (specialties: Physics & GenChem)

• SAT/ACT Prep Professional Tutor (2011-2019, via inperson/online hybrid to US & China)

• Grant Advisor (Education Specialty) for The Pollination Project, which awards seed grants internationally to nonprofit projects

• Master's in Science Teaching (Hunter College, 2007)

• Master's in Public Health (Rutgers/UMDNJ, 1998)

• Formerly:

  • Editor / ContentExpert of Physics & Chemistry practice questions @ Blueprint MCAT Prep

  • Developer of AP Physics Exam practice questions @ ETS

  • Biomedical Researcher @ Bronx VA Hospital

  • NYC Public HS Science Teacher