Nearly two-thirds of our fellows are promoted within a year of completing the Fellowship, with significant stories of impact in their systems.
Our alumni have been promoted into senior leadership roles including Superintendent, Chief Academic Officer, Chief of Schools, and other cabinet-level positions. We intentionally design the Fellowship to greatly expand networks of talented people of color and women through interactions with innovative superintendents, national thought leaders, education entrepreneurs, and our own Cambiar Catalyst community. This intentionality behind networking ensures that the most promising leaders are building networks to ensure their talent is tapped.
The initiatives fellows have led in their districts and networks have driven academic gains, higher instructional standards, improved student supports, equitable policy changes, and system turnaround. Read more about individual fellows below.
Leveraging knowledge gained from the Fellowship about strategy, teams, and innovation, Nathalie Henderson developed a theory of action for schools in her portfolio focused on creating a culture of rapid cycle improvement, data, and coaching.
For 3.5 years, she aligned all of her activities at Fulton County Schools around this theory of action, including professional development, resource allocation, and performance monitoring. This resulted in significant academic success including the percentage of students scoring proficient & distinguished on the Georgia Milestones Assessment three years in a row, reducing the percentage of turnaround eligible schools by 100%, and reducing the number of traditional schools in the learning community identified as “F” from six to one on the Georgia DOE College & Career Ready Performance Index.
Furthermore, Nathalie's work can be felt at scale as her success and work on an instructional growth rubric to coach teachers was scaled district-wide beginning in 2019-2020.
In her first year at the Madison Metropolitan School District, Nancy Hanks worked closely with the Superintendent to deploy a district-wide school improvement planning and performance monitoring strategy that continues in practice today.
The effort brought cohesion to the system’s instructional direction. This work, paired with the powerful student discipline work Nancy led, resulted in the district gaining 1077 instructional days, reduced 4th & 5th grade suspensions by 70.5%, and achieved improvements in overall student outcomes in Madison.
Furthermore, within her specific portfolio of schools, Nancy led 17 of them to at least ten point increases in literacy and math, with 5 schools seeing a 20 point increase in literacy in just five years.
As Deputy Executive Director of Teaching & Learning for Early Childhood Education at the New York City Department of Education, Andie Corso led a 12-member, cross-divisional team to design and implement a plan to differentiate site support for over 1,800 prekindergarten programs.
Her approach shifted support from equality to equity - strategically shifting resources to deploy and differentiate support for sites based on need. A change of this magnitude required influence and political change management to cultivate the relationships necessary among regional superintendents, coaches, borough leadership, the Mayor’s office, and NYU.
By 2018, about 94% of the city’s prekindergarten programs met or exceeded a threshold that predicts positive student outcomes after pre-K, according to a national evaluation system, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, developed by a coalition of experts. In 2015, just 77% of programs met the same standard.