The Chicago Public Education Fund

The Chicago Public Education Fund not only recognizes a collective sense of impatience with the pace of change in our schools. We use it to our advantage. Our investors demand results, and fast. With each four–year investment fund, The Fund lays out specific, often quantifiable goals, holding ourselves and the school system to account for achieving them. Our goals are narrowly defined but ambitious, keeping us focused on what we do best – human capital – and excelling at it.

In eight years The Fund has begun to revolutionize the way Chicago Public Schools recruits, prepares and supports top talent. We first worked to establish the bar of quality for principals and teachers, then embed quality talent across the portfolio of schools in Chicago, traditional and charter schools. The results: some of the highest standards for school leadership and accomplished teaching in the country, and a new, critical mass of highly talented individuals impacting more than 80 percent of Chicago's schools.

What's more, we've catalyzed a broad set of human capital improvements throughout the system with a relatively small amount of capital, in part by leveraging exponential dollars to scale and sustain our innovations. In our first two investment funds, The Fund committed $25 million, but leveraged an additional $130 million in private and redirected public dollars toward our efforts. It is a powerful financial model that is maximizing the partnership of private and public dollars to have a positive impact on Chicago's school system.