Our team at The Chicago Public Education Fund (The Fund) wants to make Chicago the best place to be a public school principal. The role of school leaders in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is unique in many ways, from the students they serve to the autonomy they enjoy in their positions. These conditions are directly or indirectly determined by policy — including codified practices of the district, city ordinances, and state law. Amid unprecedented shifts in the policy landscape surrounding CPS, school leaders are interested in lending their voices to discussions around policy, and their input is needed more than ever.
The Fund regularly convenes an Educator Advisory Committee, a group of around 30 CPS principals and assistant principals (APs) who provide feedback on the work we do to support their fellow school leaders. When we brought this group together for the 2023-24 school year, they expressed a particular interest in learning more about the policy environment of CPS and developing policy recommendations to create conditions that would allow them to better serve their students.
Because this was a new type of work for our Educator Advisory Committee, the principals and APs took the lead in establishing a process for developing recommendations over the course of the year. They began by discussing the major issues they saw in their day-to-day work. These discussions revealed shared experiences of difficulty hiring full-time and temporary staff, which led the committee to choose staffing shortages as their broad topic for exploration.
From this starting point, the members continued to share their experiences and recognize commonalities that affected schools of differing sizes, locations, and student populations across the district. For example, many principals reported difficulties in hiring for specific roles, such as teachers serving students with disabilities or English learners. Challenges with district communication and finding temporary teachers also arose as pain points. Rather than just pointing out issues, however, the committee moved on to developing solutions that would help to address these problems, and refined them into concrete recommendations for policymakers at various levels, which they compiled into a memo.
It was important to our Educator Advisory Committee members that their voices be heard by decision-makers. For their last session of the school year, we invited CPS Chief Talent Officer Ben Felton, who oversees district personnel policies, to hear committee members present their recommendations. Felton offered feedback on the recommendations, shared some of his office’s existing and proposed strategies to deal with shortages, and engaged in dialogue with the school leaders present. We are also sharing the committee’s memo with additional policymakers, such as other CPS leaders, state legislators, and candidates for newly elected seats on the Chicago Board of Education.
In addition to gaining direct access to policymakers, the school leaders on our Educator Advisory Committee appreciated that this policy process allowed them to focus their energies on finding larger, systemic solutions to the issues that arise in their daily work. Working with other school leaders from across the district also allowed them to see the challenges of staffing shortages from a broader perspective, rather than just in the context of their own school buildings. Overall, participants reported that their process of policy development was a valuable experience, and many are interested in continuing the work next year.
Because CPS school leaders play such a crucial role in the success of their schools, we at The Fund recognize the importance of their voices in the development of policies that will impact the conditions in which they do their work. This is one of the reasons why we conduct our annual School Leader Engagement Surveys in partnership with CPS, which are independently administered by the National Business Research Institute. Among other things, the surveys provide valuable data on what principals and APs see as areas for improvement in district policies. The work of our Educator Advisory Committee this year has provided another avenue for principal perspective in policymaking, one we hope to build on in future iterations of the committee.