Title: President and CEO
Organization: The Chicago Community Trust
Terry Mazany is president and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust. Mr. Mazany was selected as just the fifth executive in The Chicago Community Trust’s ninety-year history in 2004. In preparation for this appointment, he served as the Trust’s chief operating officer in October 2003.
Terry Mazany joined the Trust in 2001 as director and senior program officer for the Education Initiative of The Chicago Community Trust. In this capacity he led the design and implementation of the Trust’s $50 million, five-year commitment to supporting literacy, teacher and principal quality, and new school creation in Chicago. The Education Initiative has contributed to the significant and continuous improvement of student achievement in the Chicago Public Schools over the past five years. Based on this success the Trust has committed to a second five-year $50 million commitment focused on expanding system wide and across all curriculum content areas, developing more high quality principals, and supporting innovation at the local school level.
Before joining the Trust, Terry Mazany served a distinguished career in public school administration, leading improvement efforts in school districts in Michigan and California. Fundamental to this work was a commitment to equity and opportunity for all students. He served as the associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Oakland Unified School District. In this capacity he had responsibility for the transformation of the District’s 85 schools to create a system of uniformly excellent schools benefiting 53,000 students. This transformation was guided by three principles: high standards, equity of opportunity, and accountability for results. He was selected for this position in Oakland after working three years for the State of California’s acclaimed California School Leadership Academy—a State agency providing leading edge training and development to administrators and public schools throughout California.
Terry has earned a masters degree in Anthropology and a masters degree in Business Administration, with an emphasis on organizational change, from the University of Arizona. He applied this knowledge of organizational change and continuous improvement first in the Detroit Public Schools, and then in districts throughout the country including Chicago, Baltimore, and San Francisco, as well as many smaller school districts. He consulted directly with hundreds of schools and teachers, developing powerful models of curriculum and assessments within classrooms and pioneering models for whole school change.
His work in public education was an extension of his experience in a national project for public sector performance improvement that was the precursor to what became known as re-inventing government. Preceding his work in the public sector, Terry Mazany enjoyed his first career as an archaeologist and dendrochronologist—using tree-ring chronologies to date human settlements and develop past climate records.
