Putting classroom knowledge into practice
On any given day at Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Academy, students are dreaming up ways to solve problems most adults barely notice. One group imagines a vending machine that fulfills needs—stocked not with chips and candy, but with deodorant, lotion, pencils, pens, sanitary pads, and even hoodies that meet dress code. Another team wants to redesign the lanyard for student IDs so it feels more like an accessory. Another looked at the hallways, and spearheaded a campaign to decorate them with student art to improve campus culture.
Kathryn Cates, the teacher who is turning entrepreneurship into a way for students to reshape their own world, calls these “simple ideas that solve real problems students face every day.” For Cates, entrepreneurship is less about churning out CEOs and more about teaching students that their ideas have weight in the real world.
“What’s cool about entrepreneurship is that it’s so full of creativity. It’s asking kids to be natural problem solvers,” Cates said “It’s telling them to look at the world and think about the problems that exist. The students get really excited about that because they want to address the issues that they see around them, even if they’re small.”
A Dallas native, Cates has deep roots in Dallas ISD—both her mother and grandmother are proud graduates of the district. After college, she later spent more than a decade teaching in a large, urban public school system in Portland, Ore., often in school serving low-income communities. Over time, she moved into a support role that looked a lot like assistant principal work—professional development, mentoring, discipline, and restorative justice.
“I was doing that for about five years, and was really burnt out, because with that kind of work you’re always dealing with conflict,” Cates said. “I needed to do the part of teaching that I really love, which is seeing kids grow and learn.”
When Cates and her husband moved back to Dallas in 2023 to support her aging mother, she knew she wanted to work in Dallas ISD and continue serving diverse communities.
“I wanted to continue to work in low income schools that I had been working in. I feel really passionate about supporting students,” she said.
When Cates first arrived at IDEA, her job looked like a patchwork of roles: government, economics, yearbook, a semester of psychology, and a year of entrepreneurship. She later added librarian duties when the campus faced budget cuts.
All the while, IDEA’s entrepreneurship class was struggling to find steady footing. The program had cycled through “a rotating set of teachers,” as Cates put it, making it hard to build consistency or a long-term vision. Yet Cates, whom Principal Alan Varney and other colleagues identified as a potential candidate, had an advantage. She had a personal connection to business.
“My mom is a small-business owner. My family runs one of the only financial newspapers in the state,” Cates said. “So I’ve been around people running small businesses my entire life.”
Cate was already weaving economics and the “business side of history” into her teaching, and IDEA wanted someone who would commit to students and to the program for the long haul.
“They really wanted somebody who is consistent and who will show up with our kids and who has a vision for the program,” Cates said.
Though Cates was not immediately convinced, she eventually agreed to pursue her business certification, passed the exam easily, and stepped in as the entrepreneurship teacher.
“My goal has been really to make kids feel passionate about entrepreneurship, because what entrepreneurship teaches is not just running a small business; it’s really a set of skills that you need in order to kind of do anything in life,” she said.
The program Cates leads is a four-year journey. Freshmen start with the basics of the U.S. economy and capitalism, and sophomores begin conceiving business ideas. By their junior and senior years, students are actually building prototypes, conducting market research, and preparing for the workforce through practicums.
“What’s exciting to me is that I think it’s an opportunity for kids to come up with an idea in their head and then to feel supported to make that idea actually come into reality,” Cates said. “That is not something we often get to do with kids in the classroom.”
In her classes, students research markets, write business plans, and present to adults from the community. Cates urges them to treat that work as real job experience they can put on a résumé. Over time, she has watched students who once shut down at the first sign of struggle start to accept feedback, revise their ideas, and try again.
“I want to inspire students to graduate and to go and put the things that they dream of into the real world,” Cates said. “I think my greatest legacy would be to see kids in 20 years bringing innovations and changes to our world.”
Cates is clear that the ultimate goal is bigger than any one product or pitch competition. She sees entrepreneurship as a vehicle for teaching resilience, problem-solving, and a sense of agency and goes so far as to treat “failure” as a mandatory data point in the curriculum.
“The baseline assumption is that people are going to give you feedback that your product needs to change,” Cates said. “It doesn’t mean you’re a failure; it’s a part of the process.”
