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Jennifer Cheatham is a senior lecturer on education and co-chair of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP). Since earning her Ed.D. from HGSE in the Urban Superintendent’s program, Jennifer's continued focus has been on leading for equity and transformational change in school districts. Her expertise lies in creating instructional coherence, cultivating strong teams, designing systems for professional learning, and strengthening routines for organizational learning. She is currently the co-chair of the Collaborative on Political Leadership in the Superintendency.
For over six years, she served as the superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. During her tenure, she and her team established strong routines for continuous improvement at every level of the school system, strengthened the district’s core instructional program K-12, improved the district’s approach to family partnership which included design of their local approach to community schools, expanded options for post-secondary success with a focus on student-centered design, strengthened hiring and induction systems with a focus on diversity, and established powerful one-of-a-kind partnerships with a focus on research and innovation. Cheatham, in partnership with the community she served, also introduced a new, bolder agenda for the future grounded in a commitment to anti-racism, inclusion and alliance to children and families of color.
Cheatham previously served as the chief of instruction for Chicago Public Schools, a chief area officer for Chicago Public Schools, the executive director of curriculum and instruction for San Diego City Schools, and a coach and professional developer for the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC) in San Francisco. Before joining BASRC, she led a multi-year initiative aimed at improving academic literacy for middle school students in Newark, CA where she began her career as an 8th grade English teacher.
Our initial convening, informed by the research of political education scholars and the experience of current superintendents working in various contexts, confirmed how dramatically the political landscape is changing at the local level. Our country's red/blue divide is now front and center in local school governance, with a new kind of pressure on superintendents and school board members to choose which side their districts will embrace. Political education scholars have found that conservative organizations and media are well-organized and seeking to curtail equity initiatives, especially in communities undergoing significant demographic changes. But even in urban districts, superintendents face unprecedented challenges, especially in political hot spots like Florida and Texas, where incumbent school board members are losing their seats to well-organized conservatives. Our primary concern is that these political issues seriously threaten our collective efforts to reduce inequality in public education through research-based strategies. School district attempts to introduce DEI initiatives, instructional methods that integrate academic and social-emotional learning, and strategies to reduce disparities in school discipline are increasingly under attack. Even more, they are being met with a cascade of competing efforts to limit what can be taught in public school classrooms using dog-whistle terms like "critical race theory," banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and curtailing classroom dialogue that "indoctrinates'' students. Already we can see that these conflicts are pulling attention and limited resources away from the daily work of improving the quality of teaching and learning as we all try to recover from the pandemic. Meanwhile, superintendents caught in the crossfire between the "culture warriors'' and the "equity warriors" are losing their jobs. Ultimately, we believe that superintendents everywhere need support navigating these political challenges. By doing so, we can help not only protect critical work focused on addressing inequality in education, but we can begin to lay out a path forward that engages a larger swath of the public committed to the health of our public education system.
The final Askwith Education Forum of the fall semester discussed leadership, hope, and the ambition to meet the moment
HGSE panel offered advice for educators in divided times
A conversation about recovery and ongoing challenges featured past and present Chicago Public Schools leaders