John Simmons

Donors

John Simmons

President

John Simmons is the president of Strategic Learning Initiatives, a nonprofit organization serving public schools. For the past 35 years, he has worked in the field of education in the United States and abroad. His latest book, Breaking Through: Transforming Urban School Districts was published by Teachers College Press 2006.

Simmons’ career began at Harvard University where he taught economics and directed the Harvard Project on North Africa. Later he worked for the World Bank in the Policy Planning Division. He helped revise the Bank’s investment policies in education, and designed loans to finance improvements in African and Asian countries. Since leaving the Bank he has worked as a management consultant using high performance systems and continuous quality improvement strategies in the public and private sectors. He has written or edited six books and more than 75 articles on education, management and economic development.

In Chicago, he has worked with more than 40 public schools and has consulted with the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. He helped establish a national research collaborative for looking at student work and helped design the Chicago Academy for School Leadership, established by the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association and the Board of Education.

Simmons’ current work includes scaling up a successful model of whole school improvement for networks of neighborhood schools to accelerate student and adult learning. The model improves student performance across an urban school district by bringing together the best strategies and tools from education and corporate experience, and is described in Breaking Through. The policy implications of school reform are the subject of “Chicago School Reform: Lessons and Opportunities,” (2 volumes) commissioned by The Chicago Community Trust.

John's other publications include: Working Together: Employee Participation in Action, with William Mares (New York: Knopf, 1983), Better Schools: Lessons from International Reform, with others, (New York: Praeger, 1983), The Education Dilemma: Lessons for the Developing Countries in the 1980s, (Pergamon, 1979), and Transforming Russian Enterprises with John Logue and Sergey Plekhanov (Greenwood, 1995).

For fifteen years Simmons worked in Russia and Kazakhstan to privatize and restructure firms, funded by the firms and the World Bank. He has also been a faculty member at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Princeton, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Simmons received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude and a doctorate in economics from Oxford University.

In 1994, the American Society for Training and Development honored him with its award for “Outstanding Achievement in Employee Involvement.” The Erikson Institute gave him a honorary degree for this work in school reform in 2003. John and Adele have three children.