[MUSIC] Hi I'm Orrin Murray. I'm the Director of Technology and R&D at U Chicago Impact. And part of what I do there is to help the organization think about scaling projects and services that are designed to improve education across the country. >> I'm Elaine Allensworth, I'm the Director of the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Our mission is to inform reform in the Chicago public schools by doing research that informs policy and practice in Chicago, and also in districts across the county. >> Hi, my name is John Easton, I work at the Spencer Foundation here in Chicago. I'm a distinguished senior fellow there at the foundation. Spencer is the only foundation in this country that's exclusively devoted to supporting education research. My whole career I've worked in education research. I was formerly the director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the US Department of Education. And before that I was the Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research here at the University of Chicago. >> My name is Darren Reisberg. I currently serve as the Secretary of the University at the University of Chicago, where I've been since April of 2014. Prior to that and beginning in June of 2012 I was the Executive Director at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. And prior to that, and since around 2005, was at the Illinois State Board of Education, most recently in the role of General Counsel and Deputy State Superintendent. >> Hi, I'm Sue Sporty. I'm Director of Research Operations at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at University of Chicago. My main research interests have been either on how schools structure themselves for improvement or on human capital, how teachers are prepared or evaluated. At the consortium, we study a whole lot, a wide range of activities dealing with school reform, student outcomes, human capital investments, a whole wide range of things. It's a great place to work. We learn a lot from each other. >> I'm Bill Olsen, and I'm the senior director in charge of teacher education and our charter school initiatives. I'm responsible for working with the urban teacher education program, and our University of Chicago charter schools. We have two elementary, two middle, and a high school campus under one school and I'm this is my 20th year of serving Chicago students. I taught for ten years and I was a high school principal at Noble Street College Prep for nine years. I'm Timothy Knowles, and I direct the Urban Education Institute. We do four main things. We train teachers for urban schools. We operate schools serving children from across the south side of Chicago. We do applied research really geared to informing practitioners and policy makers about what matters most. And we take what we learn and we distribute it across the country to teachers, school leaders, superintendents, mayors, governors in an effort to improve the quality of American schooling at scale. >> Hi, I'm Tanika Island, the Interim Director of the UTEP program >> The UTEP program is a free service program for folks that are interested in becoming teachers. So we develop teachers to teach on the south and west sides of Chicago. It is a five year program and we are happy that our program offers a year of residency along with a year of foundations and then we also will support our teachers once they land in their teaching careers with three years of coaching. >> My name is Shane Evans, I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the University of Chicago Charter School. We have one mission at the University of Chicago Charter, which is to prepare 100% of our students for acceptance to and graduation from college, through a pre-K to 12th grade super highway, which cultivates critical thinkers and leaders. Basically what we do there is prove what's probable on the south side of Chicago and try to eliminate what we like to call a belief gap, the lack of belief that all the young people we serve have the capacity to be supremely intelligent. >> I'm Audrey Soglin. I'm the Executive Director of the Illinois Education Association, which is part of the National Education Association, the NEA. I taught for 25 years prior to having this job. And prior to this work I ran a non for profit that's called the Consortium for Educational Change. [MUSIC]