Photograph by Shoccara Marcus
When Isaiah Stephens was nine, his father died of a heart attack. Stephens began to struggle, academically and emotionally, in an underresourced public school on Atlanta’s Southside.
“I wasn’t standing out academically,” Stephens says. “Just an ordinary kid under the weight of a very deep grief.”
His educators saw something different. When he was in eighth grade, a teacher recommended him for The Veritas Schools, an extracurricular academy in Dunwoody that gives students, largely from underserved communities, a rarefied classical education centered on the art of debate. After spending his Saturdays studying subjects such as rhetoric and philosophy, Stephens departed for a two-week summer debate intensive at Harvard University, the kind of expensive program usually accessible only to students from the most elite prep schools. There, Stephens dazzled judges by cogently arguing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s role in the Balkans—handily outperforming his well-heeled opponents.
“We drill our scholars just like Olympic athletes,” says Veritas Schools founder Brandon Fleming. “We teach them to outthink . . . and out-argue the competition.” This month, a new cohort of high-school debaters will begin training for their summer intensive at Harvard, where a Veritas team has won a competition nearly every year since the school launched in 2017. Veritas has since expanded to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and opened a middle-school program, Veritas Preparatory.
Fleming is best known for his acclaimed memoir, Miseducated, which chronicles his path from a turbulent and violent youth to his role as assistant coach of the Harvard Debate Council. “I was a dropout who was told I had learning deficiencies and was basically a castoff,” he says. In 2010, a chance viewing of The Great Debaters, the Denzel Washington–led debate-team drama, changed his life. “If you can debate,” he writes in his memoir, “you can walk into any space and persuade.”
Fleming ultimately became a philosophy and debate teacher with a knack for molding students into rhetorical rock stars. While teaching at Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, he caught the attention of Harvard University, which snapped him up to coach their undergraduate debate team. On his regular visits to the campus, Fleming noticed a serious lack of Black students: He established The Veritas Schools to prove that academic excellence is a matter of access and opportunity, not skin color.
The program, funded largely by corporate partners, trains about 60 to 80 students from the 8th through 12th grades each year, providing them with a full scholarship to either Harvard’s debate course or a study abroad program at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The middle-school program offers similar classical instruction and feeds into the debate program. “Our goal is to raise the next generation of problem solvers,” Fleming says. They are well on their way: According to Veritas, 80 percent of graduates head to top 20 colleges and universities, and 20 percent to Ivy League schools.
Stephens, a rising sophomore at Morehouse College, spent this summer working as a Veritas instructor. He hopes to attend Harvard Law School and eventually tackle thorny problems like mass incarceration and the death penalty.
“Veritas was simply transformational in every way,” Stephens says. “It pushed me to raise my standards in all of my endeavors, and that has made all the difference.”
This article appears in our August 2026 issue.
