Dr. William Hayes is the CEO of Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School, the city’s only all-boys public charter school network, and the founder and managing partner of Next Ed Design Group. He is a nationally recognized voice for an education that is at once classically rigorous, culturally rooted, and unflinchingly humane, and he stands among a generation of practitioner-leaders insisting that grade-level instruction and educational equity are not in tension but inseparable.
A graduate of Morehouse College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Vanderbilt University, Dr. Hayes has led classrooms and executive teams across Boston, Cleveland, Camden, and Philadelphia. Under his leadership, Boys’ Latin has become a national reference point for how a public school serving Black boys can hold the line on classical rigor, expand college access, and design innovative pathways without trading away the cultural and intellectual inheritance its students carry into the building.
Dr. Hayes approaches systems leadership through a philosophy he calls a relational ecology of belonging and becoming, grounded in the conviction that schools must cultivate both reach and rootedness in young people. He pushes leaders to build systems the way composers build symphonies, attentive to rhythm, breath, and the silences in which understanding takes root, insisting that instruction, culture, operations, and community are interwoven strands of a single living ecosystem. Structure is never neutral, he reminds his teams: every minute on a schedule, every line in a budget, every word in a policy is a quiet argument about whose time matters and whose learning counts. He returns again and again to one question: what would this school look like if we designed it backward from the student we hope to graduate?
Known for his dynamic presence and his ability to hold humor, authenticity, and hard truths in the same room, Dr. Hayes has delivered keynotes, leadership institutes, and professional learning experiences for educators nationwide. He has been recognized by America Achieves, Kaleidoscope Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40, Morehouse 50 Under 50, and the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools Rising Leader Legacy Award. Audiences leave his sessions with sharper systems language, harder questions for their own practice, and renewed conviction that the role of education is not to prepare young people for the world as it is, but to cultivate the knowledge, courage, and voice they will use to lead it forward.