After returning home from dinner that night, Agassi and Perry Rogers, his agent and friend of many years, were once again pondering how best to use the wealth Agassi was earning in his thriving tennis career to further his personal goal of helping at-risk children. Both from well-off families, Agassi and Rogers had long been inspired by the educational philanthropy of Rogers’ father, James, who along with his wife, Beverly, has pledged or donated $275 million to various colleges and universities. For Agassi, the injury lent a new urgency to his long-running discussions with Rogers.

He decided to establish a nonprofit vehicle to fund educational and recreational programs for children in Nevada, and, by 1995, the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation was up and running. "One of the reasons I started my foundation was so that I could leverage opportunities," explains Agassi, who announced in June that he will retire from professional tennis after the U.S. Open. "The leverage that I thought I could bring was not just dollars, but also awareness to what the needs are."

TOP VIEW: Fueled by the burgeoning charter school movement, individuals, families and their foundations are crafting the future of education by establishing groundbreaking public schools for at-risk children across the country. These entrepreneurial educators face many challenges. A time-consuming and costly start-up process requires political savvy and the ability to withstand and manage community opposition. Backers must also be committed to a long—some say lifelong—endeavor.

Rogers is the foundation’s president and sits on its board. The nonprofit has raised more than $60 million since its inception, and supported more than 20 organizations. But by 1998, Agassi concluded that this approach alone could only ameliorate, and not eliminate, the problems faced by poor children.

"We started realizing that we were putting a lot of Band-Aids on issues that weren’t being solved, and we started to think, ‘How can we get ahead of the curve?’" he recalls. "My conclusion was the best way to really address the needs of children is to educate them to make better choices for themselves."

Rather than trying to fund incremental improvements to existing schools, Agassi, like a growing number of wealthy individuals who are passionate about educational reform, decided to launch his own. The Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy opened with 150 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students in economically depressed West Las Vegas in 2001. The school expects to complete its new $37 million, 180,000-square-foot campus next year. By 2008, it will educate students in kindergarten through the 12th grade.

The affluent have funded private schools for centuries. Samuel Phillips Jr. founded Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts in 1778. The school, which now boasts an endowment in excess of $600 million, educated Samuel Morse, Walker Evans and both Bush presidents. The Choate family opened what is now Choate Rosemary Hall, the alma mater of John F. Kennedy and Edward Albee, in Wallingford, Conn., in 1890. But most of these institutions were designed to educate the children of the country’s elite.

In contrast, many of the educational activists launching schools today are seeking to explore and develop new educational models that can be applied far more broadly—models that cannot be explored within the often-stifling bureaucracy of public school systems. Individuals such as Agassi, retired diamond dealer Barnett Helzberg, Long Island real estate executive Ivan Kaufman and Courtney Sale Ross, widow of Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, also seek to invest their efforts with entrepreneurial vigor and vision.