The University of Illinois at Chicago and Chicago Public Schools: A Decade of Shared School Leader Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Advancing the Leadership Pipeline Through University and District Partnerships: Perspectives on Building and Cultivating Relationships

Abstract

For 10 years, the UIC College of Education has partnered with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in a nationally recognized collaboration (Orr, et al., 2010) to produce principals who demonstrably improve student learning. That collaboration has led to: (a) nearly 10% of CPS schools led by UIC principals, often with exceptional student learning outcomes; (b) a new state law reforming principal preparation in Illinois; and (c) UIC’s nationwide recognition by various organizations and publications: e.g., recognition as the only higher education institution in the U.S. to win Exemplary status by the George W. Bush Institute’s Alliance to Reform Education Leadership (AREL), and the Council of Great City Schools/Great City Colleges of Education Urban Impact Award. It bears mentioning that the Urban Impact Award was given jointly to UIC and Chicago Public Schools on the strength of the documented results produced by our ten-year partnership.

More recently, this partnership has contributed to the formation of a contractual collaboration with CPS that represents an entirely new approach to principal pipeline development and hiring by an urban district. UIC and several other providers, including Loyola University of Chicago, New Leaders, and the Harvard TFA Project are now working together with CPS to build evidence to support a finding with potential to improve the nation’s highest-need schools—and for that matter, all schools. One of the most cost-effective—if not the single most cost-effective—methods for improving low-performing urban schools at scale is placing high-performing school principals in every school (Cosner, et al, 2012).

UIC’s partnership program outcomes were recently documented in Davis, S., Darling-Hammond, L. (2012). Before then, others have written about the effectiveness of the UIC/CPS Collaboration, including Cheney & Davis (2010), McLester (2011), and Orr, et al. (2010). Recently, two cover stories in Education Week have also addressed this partnership. For us, the key questions revolve not only on how to structure such a partnership, but also in asking, How cost-effective is the program in improving important learning outcomes for elementary and secondary school students in high-need Chicago Public Schools? Two foundational research questions are implied: what are the benefits, and what are the costs? More specifically, what is the evidence of effectiveness of the UIC Program in producing improved learning outcomes in high-need schools; and second, how costly is it to produce such improvements through school leadership development, as opposed to costs of other school-improvement interventions, including the social costs of ineffective or absent interventions. UIC has collected a substantial amount of data on these questions to demonstrate that for districts and for IHEs alike, the partnership model has powerful, evidence-based promise.

Author

• Steven E. Tozer, University of Illinois at Chicago