Karl Rectanus (’98 A.B.Ed.), entrepreneur, advisor, and chief executive officer of Really Great Reading, will deliver the UNC School of Education’s graduation address on Saturday, May 9, 2026.
The ceremony will take place at noon in Carmichael Arena on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus, with a reception to follow at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center from 2:30-5:00 p.m.
“Through entrepreneurial and research-driven work at the intersection of education, technology, and entrepreneurship, Karl Rectanus has helped expand what educational innovation can look like in practice,” said Jill V. Hamm, dean of the School and William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education. “His work reflects how innovative thinking and emerging tools can strengthen learning and create sustained outcomes for students, schools, and communities. As our graduates step into their own journeys, I know they will be encouraged by Karl’s words and inspired to use the knowledge and skills gained at the School to cultivate their own paths in education.”
As the son of a middle school teacher who spent 45 years in the classroom, Rectanus developed a longstanding commitment to students, schools, and the educators who serve them. An educator, entrepreneur, and advisor, his career has centered on scaling learning and driving measurable, evidence‑based impact across education.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in education with an emphasis in history, Rectanus was a James M. Johnston Scholar, a North Carolina Teaching Fellow, a BMW Herbert Quandt Transatlantic Fellow, and an Education Policy Fellow.
After briefly teaching in Durham County and Orange County, Rectanus stepped into an early leadership role during the first year of North Carolina’s charter schools, serving as chief financial officer for a network of core knowledge schools — a role that enabled him to move across nearly every part of school operations from testing coordination and classroom coverage to computer instruction and student supervision.
Rectanus’ interest in education systems later took him abroad, where he spent two years teaching English in rural Japan. While there, he met his wife, and the two later moved to Australia, where he launched an independent education venture that provided schools and children’s museums in the United States with accessible learning content tied to the Olympic Games. Using a simple text-based platform, he responded to daily questions from students and museum audiences, offering answers designed for elementary and middle school reading levels.
Since 2000, Rectanus’s leadership has included serving as founding executive director of the North Carolina STEM Learning Network, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-supported initiative developed in partnership with the State of North Carolina, and co-founding and leading LearnPlatform, the first rapid-cycle evaluation education technology firm. Before being acquired by Instructure, the maker of Canvas LMS, in 2022, LearnPlatform served more than 10 million students and helped create a new category of education technology research and evidence use.
Through LearnPlatform, Rectanus helped pioneer technologies that significantly reduced the time and cost required for validated third-party education research, making it easier for school districts, states, and solution providers to use evidence to inform decision-making. That work also helped shape state and federal policy, including the now-standard evidence requirements in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. LearnPlatform’s groundbreaking work in measuring edtech impact later earned recognition as part of Fast Company’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies.
Beyond the organizations he has led, Rectanus has advised organizations, policymakers, and philanthropies on how to drive systemic impact in education and other social sectors. His work in this area includes developing the Impact-Centered Organization framework, a model designed to help organizations harness positive social impact as a driver of scale and long-term success. He also founded Impact4Scale, co-chairs the Board of Directors at the Center for Entrepreneurial Development, and serves as founding chair emeritus of the Industry Council for the EdSAFE AI Alliance.
More recently, Rectanus has taken on a new mission: improving literacy outcomes for students across the United States. As chief executive officer of Really Great Reading, a leading provider of evidence-based solutions grounded in the Science of Reading, he is working to modernize one of the field’s original organizations into a results-driven model focused on helping all students learn to read and supporting those with persistent reading gaps. Rectanus brings to this work the same outcomes-focused mindset that shaped his earlier leadership — pairing rigorous implementation with accountability and emphasizing results that can improve student trajectories at scale.
Rectanus and his family reside in Raleigh, North Carolina.