Andre Agassi Backs Nashville Charter School Building As An Investor, Not A Philanthropist

Andre Agassi tells a class at Rocketship’s school on Dickerson Pike that he never wanted to play tennis, but it allowed him to get into what he considers a more fulfilling job building schools. Agassi said he dropped out of school in 8th grade to play tennis. Credit: Blake Farmer / WPLN

Tennis great Andre Agassi has been building charter schools since his retirement, and he toured his first Nashville facility Tuesday – a 37,000 square-foot facility on Dickerson Pike built for Rocketship Education. It was financed by a team of investors led by Agassi who’ve come to believe capitalism would be good for K-12 education.

Agassi has experienced a conversion, of sorts. He raised more than $100 million to build schools in his hometown of Las Vegas. But he has since come to find that depending on generosity only works for so long.

“I don’t believe – personally – that philanthropy is scalable,” Agassi told WPLN. “I thought about it a thousand times heading into this adventure. It’s a big decision to go from a philanthropic background into a space where you take private capital and bring it to an operator and help them achieve the very thing they can’t achieve on their own.”

[box]Listen here as Agassi and then his business partner Bobby Turner respond to questions from WPLN:

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Charter school operators say one of their biggest hurdles to opening is finding an appropriate facility. Some in Nashville have been able to rent old school buildings. Others have converted retail sites in strip malls. One even remodeled an old Social Security Administration office. Very few can afford to build their own building at first.

In the last three years, Agassi has teamed up with Santa Monica-based investor Bobby Turner. They’ve created the Turner-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund that finances school buildings and then rents them to charter operators deemed high-performing. The idea is to sell the building to the charter school once they get past the start-up phase.

So far, the fund is responsible for 39 schools, with at least 20 more in the works.

“If you want to treat a problem in society, philanthropy is fine,” Turner said. “But if you want to cure – really cure – you need to harness market forces to create a sustainable solution. That means making money, because only then is it scalable. And by the way, there is interdependence between profits and purpose.”

Turner says making money and making societal change can have a “symbiotic” relationship.

Tennessee law still bars for-profit companies from running charter schools. But in this case, the investor-backed firm is only handling the facilities.

The Dickerson Pike school run by Rocketship is the California-based charter operator’s first school in Nashville. The Metro board of education has already approved Rocketship to open another site on Nolensville Pike, which will likely be built by the same investors.

The new school sits on Dickerson Pike, but it faces the side street. One parent said they were glad since across Dickerson Pike is an adult bookstore. Credit: Blake Farmer / WPLN