CHICAGO PUBLIC EDUCATION FUND
200 West Adams No 2150, Chicago, IL 606065230 www.thefundchicago.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: The Chicago Public Education Fund (The Fund) is a nonprofit organization that improves public schools in Chicago by investing in the talented educators who lead them. We are a catalyst for accelerating student learning and a long standing leader in identifying and scaling what works for not only teachers and principals, but also their students.

The Fund improves public schools by investing in the talented educators who lead them.

Program and Innovation The Fund's work includes investments in principal programming, actionable data and public reporting.Fund programs serve leaders in schools across the city, representing a diversity of school types including elementary, high school, charter and district. Each year, we leverage real-time data on school needs and outcomes to implement the most effective programs for our participating educators. In 2019, we served leaders in nearly half of Chicago's public schools, impacting 154,000 students, 75% of whom are low-income. We positively impacted principal satisfaction, retention and student outcomes across important measures: 90% of principals say their participation in Fund programming increased their in-role satisfaction, and 31% of participating principals achieved an improvement in their overall 5Essentials rating, compared to a system wide average of 21% for all non-participating principals.Specifically, we served 283 principals in 373 program slots. This includes 32 principals who improved retention rates among their teachers in partnership with The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and 23 principals who worked with Tegy, Inc., to modify their school schedules to more strategically serve their students. One-hundred-fifty-four principals participated in one of 20 principal-led Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). Each PLC is facilitated by a high-performing principal with known expertise in a specific topic area. The Fund also supported 70 principal-led teams through our seventh annual Summer Design Program (SDP), a unique professional development opportunity that offers school teams the space, time and expertise to pursue innovative solutions to some of their most pressing challenges. Through the 2019 SDP, principal-led teams worked directly with expert partners from University of Chicago Impact and the National SAM Innovation Project. In addition, The Fund's work included efforts to improve the retention of Chicago's top-performing principals through the Chicago Principals Fellowship (The Fellowship), The Cahn Fellows Program and Executive Principal. The Fellowship, which is a partnership between The Fund, Crown Family Philanthropies, Chicago Public Schools and Northwestern University, is an executive-level leadership development program intended to grow the skills of top principals and further expand their leadership capacity. Twenty-three high-performing principals joined the fifth cohort of The Fellowship in 2019, committing to lead in Chicago through at least 2021. The Cahn Fellows Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, offered programming to seven Chicago principals. The Cahn Fellows Program is a national program that recognizes top principals and develops their capacity as leaders. We also launched the Executive Principal program in the 2018-19 school year. This program is a unique year-long opportunity for two principals to work and grow together through an intensive mentorship relationship. Principals, who spend up to 300 hours together throughout the school year, are paired based on complementary strength and growth areas and school demographics. Six principals engaged in the first cohort. Across all our program investments, we double down on our organizational commitment to equity. This included prioritizing supports for the schools that need it the most through one of our pilot efforts, the South Side Education Alliance. This program serves eight elementary schools on Chicago's South Side through a collaborative approach - the group shares data, defines common outcomes and tests solutions in partnership with schools and communities.

Systems and Policies In 2019, The Fund continued to support The Chicago Principal Partnership (The Partnership), a citywide effort to provide actionable principal quality data to stakeholders and ensure that principal quality remains an enduring priority in Chicago's school improvement strategy. In 2019, The Partnership utilized its Data Warehouse that produces regular reports on key principal quality metrics for stakeholders and external audiences. We also increased our efforts to engage Local School Council (LSC) members and develop resources to help LSCs hire principals. This included launching an LSC Focus Group with 12 members who all represent parents and community members. With this group, we created an informational video around the complicated processes of hiring principals and navigating school budgets, and we compiled a principal hiring toolkit.Finally, in 2019, we identified the next edge of growth in Chicago's talent strategy: building a strong leadership bench for new principals. Our data analysis showed that school performance tends to drop in the year following a principal transition and does not recover the difference, even three years later. However, successors who have prior principal experience at another CPS are typically able to drive greater improvement over time. Through the generous support of the Crown Family Philanthropies, we launched two pilot programs in the 2019-20 school year, APs Rising and the Chicago Principal Endorsement Partnership, to make the pathway to the principalship more transparent and to create principal-like experiences for aspiring leaders.

Educator Engagement The Fund seeks to engage perspectives from diverse educators to inform its program and policy efforts and develop a theory on what high-performing principals need to lead successfully. In 2019, The Fund invested resources in its Educator Advisory Committee (EAC), which is designed to inform Fund strategy and program. The EAC included fifteen principals from public schools on the West Side of Chicago. In addition, The Fund worked to inform its own and the city's efforts to improve principal quality by performing regular engagement surveys, exit surveys and focus groups with public school principals in Chicago. The Fund's annual engagement survey yielded a nearly 80% response rate and informed organizational strategy and programming.Finally, The Fund celebrated educators citywide through our third annual Principal Appreciation Campaign, which involved social media outreach with over seven million impressions, and videos sharing exceptional principal stories.

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