Council of the Great City Schools

The Council of the Great City Schools brings together 78 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems in a coalition dedicated to improving education for children in the inner cities. The council and its member school districts work to help students meet the highest standards and become successful and productive members of society. The council helps to build capacity in urban education with programs to boost academic performance and narrow achievement gaps; improve professional development; and strengthen leadership, governance, and management across the member school districts. This grant will support the development of a set of learning modules to improve mathematics instruction by enhancing teachers’ knowledge of the content. (Substrategy: District Deep Dives and Networks)

This organization of the country’s largest urban school districts proposes to partner with the Common Core authors—Student Achievement Partners—to ensure widespread adoption of high-quality standards for textbooks and teaching materials aligned to the Common Core. This grant would advance our goal of raising standards for classroom materials.

Council of the Great City Schools (Washington, DC) is an existing grantee. This grant will enable them to hire an outside evaluation firm to help track and document the outcomes of their Key Performance Indicators project with member school districts and to build capacity within the grantee organization to maintain rigorous evaluation practices over time. (New, $70,000/20 months; 100% of project budget)