50 Essential Thought Leaders in Illinois Public Education

Introduction

Illinois is the state that perfected educational inequity and then tried to dismantle it. For most of the twentieth century, Illinois ranked among the most inequitably funded school systems in the country, a state where the quality of a child's education was determined almost entirely by the property tax base of the ZIP code they were born into. Then, in 2017, Illinois passed the Evidence-Based Funding formula, one of the most ambitious school finance reforms in American history, directing new dollars toward the districts that needed them most. According to Advance Illinois's 2025 State We're In report, 11 percent of federal funding flows through Illinois schools, and while educational attainment continues to rise, serious challenges remain: teacher shortages, ESSER funding expiry, and persistent achievement gaps. Illinois is not simply a cautionary tale about school funding failures. It is one of the most instructive case studies in how a state can choose, deliberately and through sustained advocacy, to do better.

With nearly 2 million students across more than 850 school districts stretching from Chicago's South Side to the cornfields of Cairo, Illinois contains every type of public school challenge in a single state. The people shaping education here are navigating federal policy turbulence, demographic change, the aftermath of a global pandemic, and the urgent question of whether the ambitious funding reform of 2017 will actually deliver equity before the 2027 statutory deadline. These challenges are producing a generation of genuinely exceptional thinkers and practitioners. Some lead the state's largest districts. Some run rural high schools that serve fewer than 300 students. Some do their most important work in research labs and policy shops. All of them are actively shaping the answer to the question that matters most: what does a public school system owe every child?

Jonno White works with school leadership teams to facilitate the conversations and decisions that turn ideas into action. He has worked with school communities around the world, and he brings Working Genius facilitation, DISC communication workshops, and keynote speaking to teams that are ready to lead the change the thinkers on this list are calling for. To discuss how Jonno can support your school or district leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Illinois Public Education Matters

Illinois is not a typical state education story. It is home to the fourth-largest school district in the United States, a district that serves more than 315,000 students in a city where the history of school segregation, school closures, and funding disputes has shaped every generation of education policy. It is also home to some of the highest-achieving suburban school districts in the country, places like Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire and Glenbrook High School District in Northbrook, where graduation rates, AP participation, and college readiness benchmarks sit near the top of national rankings. The gap between these two realities is the central challenge of Illinois public education, and it is the reason the voices on this list matter far beyond the state's borders.

When Illinois changed its school funding formula in 2017, policy researchers across the country watched. When Chicago Public Schools navigated governance crises, democratic elections of a school board, and a superintendent transition in 2025, educators and politicians in every large American city watched. When Illinois developed its Vision 2030 framework through a coalition of five statewide education associations, district leaders in other states borrowed from the playbook. Illinois teaches the rest of the country things about what is possible and what is costly, and the people doing the teaching deserve to be followed closely.

For more on leadership in complex systems, Jonno White facilitates executive team offsites that help school and district leaders build the alignment they need to sustain change through turbulence. Email jonno@consultclarity.org for details.

How This List Was Compiled

This list draws on individuals who have made genuine contributions to public education in Illinois through sustained, visible work: published research, authored books, enacted policy, improved measurable student outcomes, developed other leaders, or built institutions that outlast any one person's tenure. Geographic diversity across the state was a primary consideration, ensuring the list reflects the full spectrum of Illinois education from Chicago and its suburbs to the rural districts of Central and Southern Illinois. Disciplinary diversity was equally important, spanning state-level policy, district leadership, building leadership, classroom teaching, advocacy, research, and workforce pathways. A deliberate effort was made to include voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside the well-known names, particularly emerging practitioners, mid-career leaders, and researchers whose work is quietly shaping the field. Every person on this list is currently active and publicly engaged in the work of improving Illinois public education.

Category 1: State and Policy Leadership

These are the voices setting the direction for Illinois public education at the highest levels, from the state superintendent's office to the advocacy organisations that have shaped Illinois school funding for a generation. Their decisions affect every student in every district, and their thinking about what Illinois education should become defines the terms of the debate.

1. Dr. Tony Sanders

Illinois State Board of Education

Appointed State Superintendent of Education in 2023 after a nationwide search, Tony Sanders brought to Springfield a decade of experience leading School District U-46, the second-largest district in Illinois, which encompasses Elgin and more than a dozen surrounding communities. His leadership style is accessible and deliberately public: his #tshirttuesday series, where he visits schools unannounced and wears the host district's shirt, has become one of the more charming and effective tools any state superintendent has used to stay connected to the actual daily life of schools. He posts regularly on LinkedIn, engaging with educators, policymakers, and community members across the state.

Sanders was a fierce advocate for Evidence-Based Funding well before he became State Superintendent, and he oversaw U-46's implementation of full-day kindergarten for all students, a grow-your-own educator initiative, and a new alternative high school focused on trauma-informed care. His 2024-2027 ISBE Strategic Plan establishes equity, student learning, learning conditions, and elevating educators as the four pillars guiding Illinois public education. At a moment when federal education policy is shifting rapidly, his role as the primary voice of Illinois school leadership makes him one of the most consequential figures in the state.

2. Robin Steans

Advance Illinois

Robin Steans has spent more than three decades working to improve outcomes for Illinois schoolchildren, and she has done more to shift the actual policy landscape of Illinois public education than almost anyone else in the state. As President of Advance Illinois, the independent bipartisan policy and advocacy organisation she has led for over fifteen years, she was a central force behind Illinois's landmark 2017 Evidence-Based Funding reform, a piece of legislation that replaced one of the most inequitable school funding systems in the country with a model that now directs new dollars toward under-resourced districts. The Advance Illinois 2025 State We're In report, which she co-produced, found that while 164 districts were funded below 60 percent adequacy when the reform began, none are below that threshold today.

Steans does not fit the pattern of advocates who talk about equity from a distance. She has spent years building coalitions, training school communities in how funding works, and lobbying legislators with data rather than sentiment. Her current focus on higher education funding reform reflects the same systemic approach: her organisation is pushing for Illinois to adopt a per-student equity formula for public universities, having already succeeded at the K-12 level. She testified before legislators in 2025 and 2026 on the need for an additional $1.7 billion in higher education investment over the next decade. Steans is not the loudest voice in Illinois education, but she may be the most effective one.

3. Kimberly A. Small

Illinois Association of School Boards

Kimberly Small is the Executive Director of the Illinois Association of School Boards, the organisation that represents the elected school boards governing every public school district in Illinois. In that role, she is one of the architects of Vision 2030, the statewide blueprint for Illinois public education developed through a coalition of five organisations and more than 1,000 stakeholder conversations. The Vision 2030 framework organises Illinois's educational aspirations around three pillars: Future-Focused Learning, Shared Accountability, and Predictable Funding. Its development required building and sustaining consensus among organisations that do not always agree, and Small's leadership of that process signals the kind of systemic thinking that rarely makes headlines but shapes the field for years.

Her work at IASB keeps her deeply connected to the governance layer of Illinois education, the layer that hires superintendents, approves budgets, and sets the local policies that either accelerate or constrain what school leaders can do. Board governance is frequently overlooked in conversations about education leadership, but it is often the most decisive factor in whether a district can sustain improvement across leadership transitions. Small's consistent advocacy for boards that are both accountable and informed makes her one of the more important voices in the Illinois education ecosystem.

4. Gary Tippsord

Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools

Gary Tippsord is the Executive Director of the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, the organisation representing the network of Regional Offices of Education that serve as a unique and often overlooked layer of the Illinois school governance structure. Illinois is one of the few states that maintains a statewide network of regional superintendents, who coordinate services, professional development, and support for local districts, particularly smaller rural districts that lack the capacity to deliver these services themselves. Understanding Illinois education without understanding the ROE network is like understanding a building without understanding its foundation.

Tippsord's stewardship of this network has made him one of the co-architects of Vision 2030, and his public statements about the framework consistently reflect a perspective that downstate and rural Illinois educators often feel is absent from high-profile education conversations. His emphasis on local flexibility alongside state accountability captures the essential tension in Illinois education policy: how to set meaningful statewide standards while respecting the vastly different contexts of 852 school districts that range from Chicago's 315,000-student system to tiny rural districts with fewer than 200 students. That tension is where Illinois education lives every day.

5. Daniel Anello

Kids First Chicago

Daniel Anello is the Chief Executive Officer of Kids First Chicago, a nonprofit advocacy organisation that sits at the intersection of education, civic engagement, and family voice in Chicago's most under-resourced communities. A Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow since 2019, Anello has positioned Kids First Chicago as one of the most credible and persistent independent voices for CPS students and families, particularly those on the South and West Sides of the city. He is active on LinkedIn and regularly engages with the national conversation about school choice, equity, and what families in disinvested communities actually need from their public schools.

Anello participated in a February 2026 state-of-education discussion alongside CPS CEO Macquline King, examining disparities in funding, access, and resources in Chicago's public schools. His contribution is not primarily a policy or research one: it is a civic accountability function. Kids First Chicago ensures that the voices of families, particularly those whose children attend the schools where stakes are highest, are present when decisions get made. That function is chronically underfunded and undervalued in the Illinois education landscape, and Anello performs it with both rigour and genuine care.

Category 2: District Leadership That Changes the Field

These are the superintendents and district leaders whose work has generated national attention, produced published frameworks, or created genuine models for what it means to lead a school district with both accountability and imagination. They are not simply managing large systems: they are redefining what leadership in those systems looks like.

6. Dr. Nick Polyak

Leyden Community High School District 212

Nick Polyak is the 2026 Illinois Superintendent of the Year, an honour awarded by an independent panel commissioned by the Illinois Association of School Administrators, and the recognition captures a career that has been quietly and consistently remarkable. As superintendent of Leyden High School District 212, serving approximately 3,500 students across Franklin Park, River Grove, Rosemont, and Schiller Park, Polyak has led more than $200 million in facility modernisation projects without raising local property taxes, pioneered one of the nation's earliest Chromebook implementations in 2012, and created Co.Lab, an interdisciplinary freshman programme that breaks down traditional subject silos.

His thought leadership extends well beyond Leyden. He is the co-author, with Michael Lubelfeld and PJ Caposey, of five books including The Unlearning Leader: Leading for Tomorrow's Schools Today, and has run the international #suptchat on Twitter and X for a decade, a community of superintendent professional learning that has connected thousands of school leaders across the country. He has developed and taught the Illinois Aspiring Superintendent Academy for over a decade, with more than 100 of his former students now serving as superintendents across the state. Polyak delivers keynote presentations on five continents and leads three AASA leadership cohorts nationally.

7. Dr. PJ Caposey

Oregon CUSD 220

PJ Caposey is the 2022 Illinois Superintendent of the Year, a finalist for the AASA National Superintendent of the Year award, and the author of ten published books, making him the most prolific author currently serving as a sitting superintendent in American public education. As superintendent of Oregon CUSD 220 in northwest Illinois, and previously of Meridian CUSD 223, he has led the kind of transformational district turnarounds that typically appear in textbooks: taking schools from the bottom of their county in performance to earning national recognition for governance, culture, and academic achievement. Oregon High School's 2024 Partners for Excellence Gold Distinction was the first such recognition awarded in over two decades.

His books span leadership, school culture, equity, teacher evaluation, and continuous improvement, and his commentary has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, and CBS This Morning. He was featured in a Global Leaders Forum think piece and his most recent book, co-authored with Bryan Wills, is Cracking the Coaching Code: Using Personality Archetypes to Maximize Performance (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023). He teaches in higher education, serves on national advisory boards, and speaks nationally and internationally. Caposey is, by almost any measure, the most nationally prominent practitioner-writer working in Illinois public schools today.

8. Dr. Michael Lubelfeld

North Shore School District 112

Michael Lubelfeld has served as a public school superintendent in Illinois since 2010, and he has used that tenure to become one of the state's most consistent advocates for the idea that leadership development is not a supplementary activity for administrators: it is the core of the work. Currently leading North Shore School District 112, serving Highland Park and Highwood north of Chicago, Lubelfeld was named one of District Administration's Top 100 Education Influencers in 2025, received the IETL Delta Award for innovation, was accepted into the 2025 ISTE-ASCD Generation AI Fellowship, and was selected for the 2025-2026 Google-GSV Fellowship. These are not honorary recognitions: each reflects active, ongoing engagement with the leading edge of educational practice.

With Nick Polyak and PJ Caposey, Lubelfeld co-authored Student Voice: From Invisible to Invaluable, the foundational text on elevating student perspective in school governance and decision-making. He presents on leadership topics internationally, leads aspiring superintendent workshops across the country, and maintains an active presence on X and LinkedIn. His co-authored book The Unfinished Leader frames leadership as a permanent state of growth rather than a destination to be reached, a framing that resonates particularly in a professional environment that too often conflates credentials with capability.

9. Dr. Macquline King

Chicago Public Schools

Macquline King is the CEO and Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the United States, serving more than 315,000 students across more than 640 schools. Named permanent CEO by an 18-1 board vote in March 2026 after serving as interim since June 2025, King is a lifelong product of the CPS system: she attended Chicago public schools, taught in Chicago public schools for twelve years, became a National Board Certified Teacher, completed the New Leaders principal preparation programme, and led two CPS schools before moving into system-level leadership. Her appointment as permanent CEO represents a CPS-first philosophy that the board applied deliberately, selecting someone whose entire professional identity is shaped by the system she now leads.

Her tenure at CPS is beginning during one of the district's most consequential periods, navigating a $10 billion budget, increased immigration enforcement activity affecting student families, and the board's Success 2029: Together We Rise strategic plan. She has been active on LinkedIn, including participation in state-of-education events with senior civic leaders, and her presence in Illinois and national education conversations is growing rapidly. Her standing as the leader of the state's largest and most watched school system makes her one of the most important voices in Illinois public education.

10. Dr. Tiffany S. Brunson

Elementary School District 159

Tiffany Brunson is a superintendent, a U.S. Army veteran, and a founding board member of the Illinois Alliance of Black School Educators, and she has spent thirty years building a career that refuses easy categorisation. As Superintendent of Elementary School District 159 in the south suburbs of Chicago, she was honoured as a 2025 Illinois Transformative Superintendent, a recognition that captures the quality of her leadership: principled, human-centred, and grounded in a vision of education that centres student voice and belonging above performance metrics. She is President-Elect of the Superintendents' Commission for the Study of Demographics and Diversity.

Her contribution to the public conversation about Illinois education comes through her unapologetic advocacy for equity, her mentorship of emerging women of colour in school leadership, and her authorship in Centering Our Voices: The Anthology, a collection amplifying the experiences of Black women in education. She presented at the 2026 Illinois Principals Association Women in School Leadership Conference. Brunson represents the kind of superintendent who understands that transforming a district requires transforming the culture, and that transforming the culture requires leaders who bring their full selves to the work.

11. Dr. Jennifer Norrell

Aurora East USD 131

Jennifer Norrell is the Superintendent of Aurora East USD 131, a district that serves a high-need community in the greater Chicago metropolitan area with a student population that is predominantly Latino and low-income. She was one of the participating voices in the Vision 2030 development process, and her framing of that work reflects a superintendent who thinks both about the immediate daily needs of her students and the long-term policy conditions that will determine whether those students' schools are adequately resourced a decade from now. Her perspective on school funding carries particular weight because it is rooted in the daily reality of leading a district that has historically been below adequacy targets.

Norrell is a voice for the districts that the Evidence-Based Funding formula was designed to serve, the underfunded communities that received the most benefit from the 2017 reform and that have the most to lose if the state's funding commitments slow or stall before the 2027 adequacy target is reached. Her presence in statewide education discussions ensures that the policy conversation does not drift toward the concerns of already-resourced districts.

12. Dr. Charles Johns

Glenbrook High School District 225

Charles Johns is the Superintendent of Glenbrook High School District 225, which includes Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South, two of the highest-performing high schools in Illinois and nationally. His inclusion on this list is not simply because his district achieves excellent outcomes: it is because he understands and articulates why the conditions that allow his district to achieve those outcomes are not universally available, and he has used his platform within Vision 2030 to advocate for a more equitable distribution of those conditions. His reflection on the Vision 2030 process specifically cited the importance of conversations across the entire state, not just in high-resource suburban contexts.

Johns's leadership at Glenbrook reflects a philosophy of continuous improvement that takes seriously the idea that even high-performing systems have significant room to grow in serving every student. His district has expanded equity of access to rigorous courses, including dual-credit and Advanced Placement programmes. His perspective from the affluent end of the Illinois funding spectrum is essential to understanding why the funding gap matters and how it shapes what leadership can achieve.

13. Dr. Sherly Chavarria

Matteson School District 162

Sherly Chavarria is the Superintendent of Matteson School District 162 in the south suburbs of Chicago, and her service on the Illinois State Board of Education, acknowledged publicly by State Superintendent Tony Sanders, reflects the kind of cross-institutional civic engagement that distinguishes outstanding district leaders from merely good ones. South suburban Cook County contains some of the most under-resourced school communities in Illinois, and leading a district in this context requires combining the practical management of constrained resources with a sustained public advocacy for the equity the Evidence-Based Funding formula was supposed to deliver.

Her presence in state-level governance through ISBE board service gives her an unusual dual vantage point: she is simultaneously experiencing the consequences of state education policy as a practicing superintendent and helping to shape that policy through her advisory role. That combination of practitioner experience and policy engagement is precisely the kind of leadership Illinois's complex funding situation demands.

Category 3: Building Leaders and Teacher Voices

Illinois's most important educational thought leadership does not live exclusively in central offices and policy shops. It lives in classrooms and school buildings, where the daily decisions of teachers and principals translate every policy commitment into actual student experience. These voices belong to people who are shaping the field from the ground up.

14. Dr. Jason Leahy

Illinois Principals Association

Jason Leahy has served as the Executive Director of the Illinois Principals Association for nearly two decades, making him one of the longest-serving state principal association leaders in the country and one of the most consistently influential voices in Illinois school leadership development. A former chemistry and physics teacher, high school principal, and doctoral graduate, Leahy has led the development of the Illinois New Principal Mentoring programme, participated in the redesign of Illinois's principal preparation programmes, and served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards design team for the National Board Standards for Accomplished Principals.

His August 2025 podcast appearance on the Education Leadership Briefing discussed the IPA's School Leader Paradigm system, a research-based framework for school leader evaluation and growth now being adopted by districts across the state in partnership with 13 state principal associations. The framework represents a shift from punitive evaluation models to developmental ones, a shift Leahy has championed throughout his tenure. For anyone seeking to understand how Illinois is thinking about principal development and school leader support at scale, Leahy's work is the essential starting point.

15. Victor Gomez

East Leyden High School

Victor Gomez is the 2025 Illinois Teacher of the Year, a chemistry teacher at East Leyden High School in the western suburbs of Chicago, and his selection for that honour reflects something more interesting than outstanding teaching metrics. Gomez co-developed East Leyden's bilingual programme and pioneered the school's first bilingual chemistry course, creating STEM pathways for multilingual students that include college credit through Elmhurst University's STEM Academy. A state-funded sabbatical beginning in July 2025 has allowed him to expand his innovative teaching approaches statewide, positioning him as a practitioner-researcher actively shaping what culturally responsive science instruction looks like in an Illinois classroom.

He fosters cultural connection and belonging outside the classroom through the Alianza Latina student club and the Mariachi Aguilas de Leyden ensemble, and his recognition landed in a political moment when bilingual education and cultural competency in teaching are increasingly contested at the state and federal level. That context makes his visibility and his continued willingness to speak publicly about the value of his approach a form of advocacy as much as pedagogy. Tony Sanders publicly wore an East Leyden shirt in Gomez's honour after his award, a gesture of visible solidarity from the State Superintendent.

16. Dr. Rachael Mahmood

Illinois Teacher of the Year 2024

Rachael Mahmood is the 2024 Illinois Teacher of the Year, and her contribution to the public conversation about education in Illinois extends well beyond the classroom recognition that title implies. She appeared on the Illinois Principals Association's Becoming Principal podcast in 2024, where she used her platform to talk about what she calls being the thermostat and not the thermometer, a framework for how educators can set the tone and temperature of their school communities rather than simply reacting to external conditions. That framing, and her willingness to share it publicly on platforms read and listened to by school administrators, reflects a teacher who understands that influence flows in both directions.

Mahmood's work in creating a culture of belonging in her school community has attracted attention from Illinois educators who recognise that belonging is not a soft aspiration: it is a measurable condition that affects attendance, engagement, and academic performance. Her voice as an active Illinois teacher who is publicly articulating what genuinely supportive school cultures require is one that school leaders, policymakers, and community members should be following closely.

17. Angela Williams

Elgin School District U-46

Angela Williams is a Special Education Administrator in Elgin School District U-46 and the author of Leadership Lemons, a LinkedIn series that has built her a following among Illinois educators who appreciate honest, reflective, and occasionally self-deprecating writing about what it actually means to lead in a school environment. Her work focuses on special education administration, leadership development, and the particular challenges of leading teams in emotionally demanding environments where both student needs and staff wellbeing require sustained attention. She appeared on the IPA Becoming Principal podcast in 2024, where she discussed her journey from classroom teacher to administrator.

Williams's LinkedIn presence is notable because she writes not as a polished thought leader dispensing wisdom from a distance, but as a practitioner working through real problems in real time. That quality of reflective authenticity is rare in professional writing about school leadership, and it is precisely what makes Leadership Lemons worth following for anyone who wants to understand what leadership in Illinois schools looks and feels like from the inside.

18. Fareeda Shabazz Anderson

Walter Payton College Prep, Chicago Public Schools

Fareeda Shabazz Anderson is the Principal of Walter Payton College Prep, consistently ranked the top high school in Chicago, and a 2026 Chicago Defender Women of Excellence honouree. She began as the founding principal of Crane Medical Prep and has spent over two decades building school cultures that combine academic excellence with genuine commitment to equity, global learning, and student voice. Her work at Payton represents an unusual combination: leading a school that is already by many measures at the top of its city system while maintaining a philosophy that frames that success as an ongoing responsibility rather than a destination.

Her recognition as a Chicago Defender Women of Excellence honouree comes from a community with high standards for what school leadership at the CPS level actually requires. Shabazz Anderson posts actively on LinkedIn about leadership, culture, and what it means to lead in a school community where students are genuinely watching how adults navigate complexity, disagreement, and change. Her voice represents the building-level perspective that is often missing from conversations dominated by district and state leaders.

19. Jake Palmer

Fisher Grade School

Jake Palmer is the principal of Fisher Grade School in central Illinois, a small-town educator whose contribution to the Illinois public education conversation comes through his passionate and relentlessly relational approach to school leadership. He appeared on the IPA Becoming Principal podcast in 2024, where his energy and commitment to building strong relationships with staff, students, and families generated a response that reflected how much Illinois educators appreciate a voice from outside the Chicago metropolitan context. His motto, being the thermostat and not the thermometer, echoes the framing shared by Rachael Mahmood and reflects how widely that idea of intentional culture-setting has spread through Illinois school leadership thinking.

Palmer's importance as a thought leader on this list is partly about representation: a genuine practitioner voice from a small, rural-adjacent school community who articulates a philosophy of leadership as applicable to a school with two hundred students as it is to a district of thirty thousand. Central Illinois's school communities are frequently under-resourced in ways that have nothing to do with funding and everything to do with attention, and voices like Palmer's remind Illinois education conversations that the state extends beyond the metropolitan boundaries of Chicago and its suburbs.

20. Dr. Arturo Senteno

Leyden Community High School District 212

Arturo Senteno is an administrator at Leyden Community High School District 212 who was named one of District Administration's Top 100 Education Influencers for 2025, making him one of the younger voices in Illinois education to achieve that level of national recognition. He earned his Ed.D. from the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his journey through that programme, documented with characteristic openness on LinkedIn, reflects a commitment to scholarly rigour alongside practitioner experience. His dissertation and subsequent work connect leadership theory to the daily practical reality of serving the diverse student communities of the Chicago western suburbs.

Senteno is active on LinkedIn, engaging with content about leadership development, educational equity, and school innovation, and his willingness to share his own professional development journey publicly makes him a visible model for the kind of reflective practitioner that Illinois's most progressive school cultures are trying to develop. His presence at Leyden, a district already represented on this list by Nick Polyak and the subject of sustained national attention for its innovations, reflects the depth of leadership culture that the district has built at multiple levels.

Category 4: EdTech, Innovation, and the Future of Learning

Illinois has quietly become one of the national leaders in educational technology adoption, with a network of district-level Chief Technology Officers who are doing genuinely interesting and rigorously accountable work. These voices are not technology enthusiasts first and educators second: they are educators who have developed deep expertise in how technology can and cannot serve learning.

21. Phil Hintz

Niles Township High School District 219

Phil Hintz is the Chief Technology Officer of Niles Township High School District 219, a 2019 CoSN Withrow CTO of the Year, and one of the 2025 District Administration Top 100 Influencers in Education. He is completing his Doctorate in Educational Leadership researching augmented and virtual reality's impact on students with intellectual disabilities, a research agenda that positions him at the precise intersection of emerging technology and equity that defines the most important questions in educational technology today. He is active on LinkedIn and a board member of the Illinois Educational Technology Leaders.

His work in Niles Township has focused on how technology infrastructure decisions translate into actual learning experiences for students across the ability spectrum, and his research on AR and VR for students with intellectual disabilities represents genuine frontier work in a field where most conversations about learning technology focus exclusively on neurotypical students. Hintz brings a practitioner's scepticism to EdTech: he is not interested in tools for their own sake, and his public commentary consistently grounds technology decisions in evidence about student outcomes.

22. Eric Hansen

Diamond Lake School District 76

Eric Hansen is the Director of Technology and Communications for Diamond Lake School District 76, an award-winning educational technology leader with a national reputation for combining innovation in instructional technology with a deeply communicative approach to school-community relationships. He is a board member of the Illinois Educational Technology Leaders and a professional speaker on EdTech leadership, and his guiding principle, Next-Gen Thinking, Unyielding Perseverance, captures an approach to educational technology that balances ambition with the practical realities of what districts can actually implement and sustain.

Hansen is a Certified Education Technology Leader and active in state and national EdTech conversations. His dual focus on instructional technology and communications reflects an understanding that the most technically sophisticated EdTech implementations fail when schools do not communicate effectively with families and communities about what the technology is for and why it matters. Diamond Lake's recognition for innovation in this area under his leadership reflects a philosophy that treats technology as a means of building connection as much as a tool for improving instruction.

23. John Armstrong

Joliet Public Schools District 86

John Armstrong is the Chief Officer for Technology and Innovation at Joliet Public Schools District 86, one of the larger school districts in the Chicago metropolitan area. A member of the Illinois Educational Technology Leaders board, he holds a Ph.D. and brings an explicitly innovation-oriented leadership framework to a district context that requires balancing cutting-edge thinking with the operational realities of a large, diverse urban system. His work focuses on systemic change and fostering creative growth across both technology and fine arts, an unusual combination that reflects a philosophy of innovation as a disposition rather than a department.

Joliet Public Schools serves a complex and diverse student population, and Armstrong's work with the IETL board ensures that the challenges and learnings from a large, urban-adjacent district inform the state conversation about educational technology in ways that go beyond the suburban contexts that dominate most EdTech discussions in Illinois. His commitment to equity in technology access is evident in his district work and in his contributions to statewide conversations through the IETL professional community.

24. Amanda White

Community Consolidated School District 46

Amanda White is the Director of Innovation for Community Consolidated School District 46, a district serving approximately 3,600 PreK-8 students in the diverse suburbs northwest of Chicago. With twenty years in education spanning classroom teaching, instructional coaching, and district-level administration, she brings a genuine instructional perspective to technology leadership that is sometimes missing from EdTech roles filled primarily by technology infrastructure specialists. Her work at CCSD 46 focuses on ensuring both the infrastructure and the instructional practices are in place to produce actual outcomes for students, not just impressive tools.

White's combination of classroom experience and district-level innovation leadership reflects one of the most valuable profiles in Illinois educational technology: someone who understands what technology feels like to a teacher trying to use it with twenty-seven students on a Tuesday afternoon. That perspective shapes how she thinks about technology adoption, professional development, and the conditions that allow innovation to take hold and sustain rather than arriving with enthusiasm and fading with the next budget cycle.

Category 5: Research and the University Voices

Illinois has extraordinary educational research infrastructure, particularly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois Chicago. These researchers are producing work that directly shapes how Illinois school leaders understand equity, funding, and practice, and they are increasingly willing to bring that work to public audiences.

25. Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Rochelle Gutierrez is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and one of the most internationally recognised scholars working on mathematics education, equity, and what she calls rehumanising mathematics. She was named to the National Academy of Education in 2025, one of the highest honours in educational scholarship. Her work challenges the dominant framework in which mathematics is treated as a culturally neutral, race-blind discipline, and argues that this framing systematically disadvantages students whose identities and ways of knowing are not reflected in conventional mathematics pedagogy.

Her scholarship has influenced mathematics curriculum, teacher preparation, and equity policy across the United States and internationally, and her willingness to engage with public and practitioner audiences rather than confining her work to academic channels has made her ideas genuinely accessible to Illinois teachers and school leaders. Her concept of rehumanising mathematics has become a touchstone for Illinois educators working on culturally responsive pedagogy, and her 2025 research publications in leading peer-reviewed journals demonstrate ongoing scholarly productivity at the frontier of the field.

26. Dr. Paul Bruno

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Paul Bruno is an Assistant Professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his research on school funding, teacher labour markets, and computer science education makes him one of the most policy-relevant researchers in the Illinois education ecosystem. His analysis of school funding reform was recently cited in the Biden-Harris Administration's 2023 Economic Report of the President, and his ongoing work on Illinois's complex funding structures is essential reading for anyone trying to understand why Illinois's equity problem is both serious and genuinely difficult to solve.

Bruno brings the particular value of a native Illinoisan who taught middle school science in California before returning to research: his work combines the empirical rigour of a policy economist with the practitioner intuition of someone who has actually managed a classroom. His collaboration with doctoral student Haeryun Kim on analysis of California's Local Control Funding Formula for the Brookings Institution, and his faculty partnership with Jennifer Nelson on qualitative studies of teacher hiring, represents the kind of cross-methodological research that produces the most complete picture of how school systems actually function.

27. Dr. Yoon Pak

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Yoon Pak is a Professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department at UIUC and a principal investigator on the $600,000 Illinois State Board of Education grant to develop deep-dive professional development for Illinois K-12 administrators on Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards. This grant, focused on creating a community of practice approach to continuous improvement for school leaders, addresses one of the most consequential gaps in Illinois school leadership development: the distance between administrators' knowledge of equity as a principle and their capacity to lead it as practice.

Pak's academic work spans the history of education, Asian American educational experiences, and the political dimensions of school curriculum and leadership, and her applied work through ISBE connects that historical and critical scholarship to the daily work of school administrators. The professional development she is designing for Illinois administrators is not a workshop series: it is a framework for sustained, evidence-grounded growth in the kind of leadership that produces equitable schools rather than simply declaring them.

28. Dr. Stephanie Toliver

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Stephanie Toliver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UIUC and a principal investigator on a $1 million grant from the Illinois State Board of Education to develop a microcredential series aligned with the Illinois Comprehensive Literacy Plan. This work, which includes creating an in-person literacy academy and curating instructional resources for teachers across the state, addresses what many Illinois educators consider one of the most pressing and practically urgent challenges in the system: ensuring that Illinois's new literacy standards translate into genuine changes in how teachers teach reading.

Toliver's research and teaching focus on literacy, race, and curriculum, and her ability to connect critical scholarship about how literacy is taught and whose literacy counts with the practical demands of developing scalable professional learning for Illinois teachers makes her one of the most impactful researchers currently working in the state's education system. Her collaborators on the ISBE grant include three other UIUC faculty members, reflecting the kind of interdisciplinary approach that translates research into actual changes in classroom practice.

29. Dr. Lorenzo Baber

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Lorenzo Baber is a Professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department at UIUC and a co-investigator on the ISBE-funded professional development initiative on Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards alongside Yoon Pak and Denice Hood. His scholarly work focuses on equity in education, racialised experiences in educational settings, and the conditions that produce genuinely inclusive institutional cultures rather than performative ones. His collaborative research approach, which brings together policy scholars, curriculum researchers, and educational psychologists, reflects an understanding that the equity challenge in Illinois schools is too complex to be addressed from any single disciplinary vantage point.

Baber's contribution to the Illinois education conversation is both scholarly and applied: through the ISBE professional development work, he is directly shaping how Illinois school administrators understand and practice culturally responsive leadership. In an environment where equity has become a contested term, his work offers the grounding that allows school leaders to move from political debate toward practical implementation of the changes that actually improve outcomes for underserved students.

30. Dr. Denice Hood

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Denice Hood is a Professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department at UIUC and the third co-investigator on the ISBE Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards professional development project. Her research encompasses race, equity, and educational leadership, with particular attention to the structural conditions that either support or impede the development of racially conscious and culturally responsive leaders in Illinois schools. Her collaboration with Pak and Baber on the ISBE grant reflects the depth of UIUC's collective commitment to ensuring that the state's equity agenda is grounded in rigorous scholarship.

Hood's work is especially valuable at a moment when Illinois's equity commitments are being tested by a shifting federal policy environment. The state's ability to sustain momentum on culturally responsive education when federal signals are moving in the opposite direction will depend significantly on whether Illinois school administrators have the conceptual and practical preparation to lead that work without external validation. That preparation is precisely what Hood's research and professional development work is building.

31. Dr. Jennifer Nelson

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Jennifer Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department at UIUC whose research on teacher hiring and principal decision-making illuminates one of the most consequential and least studied processes in school improvement. In collaboration with Paul Bruno, she is conducting qualitative research interviewing school principals about how they hire teachers and navigate the bureaucratic constraints and informal pressures that shape those decisions. This kind of qualitative, practitioner-centred research fills a significant gap in the quantitative policy literature.

Nelson's research addresses a practical challenge that every Illinois principal navigates: how to attract and retain excellent teachers in a competitive and constrained hiring environment. Her ability to elicit honest reflection from practitioners about how they actually make these decisions, rather than how they theoretically should, gives her work a quality of applied relevance that translates directly into what Illinois's principal preparation programmes and leadership development organisations can teach.

32. Dr. Lionel Allen Jr.

University of Illinois Chicago

Lionel Allen Jr. is the Vice Chancellor for Engagement at the University of Illinois Chicago and a faculty member in the College of Education, a dual role that positions him at the intersection of research, community engagement, and institutional leadership in one of the most diverse urban universities in the country. UIC's College of Education sits at the heart of Chicago's South Side and serves as a major pipeline for the educators and school leaders who fill Chicago Public Schools and the broader Cook County school system. Allen's leadership of UIC's community engagement function means he is thinking constantly about how the university's research and professional preparation capacity connects with the school communities that most need it.

His work at the intersection of UIC and the Chicago public education ecosystem reflects the kind of translational leadership that high-quality education research requires: moving ideas and capacity between the university and the schools without the friction that too often prevents good research from reaching the practitioners who can use it most. His leadership of UIC's broader engagement portfolio gives him a visibility and convening power within the Chicago education community that is unusual for a university leader.

Category 6: Equity, Access, and Advocacy

These are the voices working in the space between policy and practice, the organisations, advocates, and practitioners who are doing the hard work of ensuring that Illinois's equity commitments translate into actual changes in actual schools and classrooms.

33. Dr. Karime Asaf

Chicago Public Schools

Karime Asaf was named Chief Education Officer of Chicago Public Schools by the Chicago Board of Education in April 2026, a role that consolidates the district's academic leadership under a single position focused on equitable and inclusive education. A proud Colombian immigrant and bilingual educator, Asaf spent the early part of her career as a bilingual teacher and special education case manager before moving into building and district leadership, becoming principal, then network chief of schools for Network 4 where she oversaw 34 elementary schools, and then Chief of the Office of Multilingual-Multicultural Education. She earned her Doctorate in educational leadership from DePaul University.

Her most recent work as OMME chief focused on expanding access to rigorous and culturally responsive programming for English Learner students in CPS, collaborating with the Mayor's Office and community partners to support newcomer students and their families during a period of intensified federal immigration enforcement. She played a central role in shaping the CPS Success 2029: Together We Rise strategic plan, establishing the Multilingual Pathways priority. The depth of her experience with the students and families that Illinois's equity agenda most directly concerns makes her one of the most important voices in the state's public education conversation.

34. Eyob Villa-Moges

Advance Illinois

Eyob Villa-Moges is a Senior Policy Associate at Advance Illinois, where he has become one of the most active younger voices in Illinois's K-12 and higher education policy landscape. In 2025, he was prominently cited in NPR Illinois coverage of the state's push for a higher education funding formula, explaining the technical design of the proposed per-student equity formula to general audiences in terms that combined policy precision with genuine accessibility. His work at Advance Illinois sits at the intersection of evidence, advocacy, and coalition-building, the three disciplines that produced Illinois's landmark 2017 K-12 funding reform.

Villa-Moges represents a generation of Illinois education policy professionals who grew up in the aftermath of the Evidence-Based Funding debate and understand that reform at this scale requires sustained, multi-year coalition-building that does not make headlines but shapes legislation. His ability to translate complex funding mechanisms into public arguments that legislators, community members, and journalists can follow is a skill that the Illinois education conversation depends on having.

35. Dr. Jennifer Garrison

Carbondale Community High School District 165

Jennifer Garrison is the Superintendent of Carbondale Community High School District 165 in southern Illinois, and her presence on this list reflects a deliberate effort to ensure that the downstate perspective is genuinely represented by someone with standing and visibility within the Illinois education system. She appeared as a featured voice in an IASA podcast alongside fellow superintendent Sherri Smith, discussing district storytelling as a strategy for building trust with entire communities rather than just current school families. That conversation reflects a leadership philosophy focused on public communication as a form of accountability.

Carbondale's educational context is genuinely different from the suburban Chicago districts that dominate most Illinois education conversations: it is a university town in a rural region, navigating the distinctive challenges of socioeconomic diversity, rural isolation, and the particular pressures of a community whose public school system is both central to its identity and subject to the same long-term demographic and funding pressures affecting downstate Illinois broadly. Garrison's voice in statewide conversations provides a reality check that the conversation benefits from hearing.

36. Sherri Smith

Illinois school district superintendent

Sherri Smith is an Illinois public school superintendent and a featured voice in an IASA podcast on district storytelling and community trust-building. Her collaboration with Jennifer Garrison on that topic reflects a shared philosophy about what school district leadership in an era of declining public trust in institutions requires: not just better communication, but a fundamentally different relationship between schools and the communities they serve. Smith's work reflects the growing recognition among Illinois superintendent leaders that transparency, narrative, and genuine community engagement are not supplementary to the core work of school improvement; they are conditions for it.

Her contribution to this list reflects the kind of practitioner voice that is not always visible in formal leadership rankings or research citations but that is shaping the daily culture of Illinois school districts through the professional networks that active superintendents build and sustain. The IASA podcast platform has become an important space for Illinois school leaders to think aloud in public, and Smith's participation in that space reflects a willingness to model the reflective, relational leadership that the best Illinois districts are trying to develop at every level.

37. Dr. Portia Ransom

Illinois school district

Portia Ransom is an Illinois school district coordinator for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion whose work on cross-role collaboration with family engagement coordinator Patricia Briones was featured at the 2026 Illinois Principals Association I-Grow Summit. The work they presented together focused on how two women of colour, working in complementary roles within the same district, have built a sustained partnership that dismantles barriers for marginalised students and families through shared leadership and community presence. This collaborative model represents an important alternative to the siloed approach that often characterises equity work in school districts.

Ransom's contribution is both practical and cultural: she is building and demonstrating the kind of cross-functional equity leadership that produces genuine belonging for students who are otherwise invisible to the institutions meant to serve them. Her visibility at the IPA I-Grow Summit reflects recognition within the Illinois principal and school leader community that the equity challenges facing Illinois schools require exactly this kind of systemic, relationship-centred approach.

38. Patricia Briones

Illinois school district

Patricia Briones is an Illinois school district coordinator for Family Engagement whose collaboration with Portia Ransom has become a model for how two district-level roles can be aligned to produce outcomes neither could achieve alone. Their presentation at the 2026 IPA I-Grow Summit, focused on dismantling barriers and cultivating belonging for Black boys, Hispanic families, and underserved school communities through intentional cross-role leadership, captured the attention of Illinois principals and school leaders who are navigating the same challenge in their own buildings and districts.

Family engagement in Illinois schools is chronically under-resourced and often conceptualised as a supplementary programme rather than a core component of what makes schools work for families whose children need them most. Briones's work represents a practitioner model for how family engagement, when it is led with genuine intention and cultural competence, transforms not just individual family experiences but institutional culture.

39. Breana Calloway

Lenart Regional Gifted Center, Chicago Public Schools

Breana Calloway is the Resident Principal of Lenart Regional Gifted Center, a high-performing selective enrollment school on Chicago's South Side, and a doctoral student in the Urban Education Leadership Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her journey from AmeriCorps member tutoring elementary students in CPS to classroom teacher to aspiring principal reflects the kind of deep CPS rootedness that the system's most effective building leaders tend to share. Her participation in the Illinois Principals Association School Leader Pipeline Programme positions her as a voice for the next generation of CPS school leaders.

Her presence on this list reflects the importance of including not only established leaders but those who are actively building their practice and their public voice in real time. The Urban Education Leadership doctoral programme at UIC is one of the most rigorous preparation pathways for CPS principals in the country, and Calloway's willingness to pursue that preparation while serving in a demanding building leadership role demonstrates the kind of commitment to continuous growth that the best Illinois building leaders model for their teachers.

40. Robin Vannoy

Illinois school district

Robin Vannoy is an Illinois educator whose work on affinity spaces for educators of colour was featured at the 2026 IPA I-Grow Summit, where she co-presented on how professional affinity spaces provide educators of colour with safe environments to connect, share experiences, and sustain their leadership roles in systems that do not always make that sustainment easy. This work addresses one of the most significant and underacknowledged challenges in Illinois public education: the retention and development of educators of colour in a profession and in districts that frequently exhaust, marginalise, or fail to promote them.

The evidence that diverse teachers have disproportionately positive effects on students of colour, particularly in long-term academic outcomes and sense of belonging, is substantial. Vannoy's work on creating the structural conditions that keep diverse educators in the profession and support them into leadership roles is therefore not a supplementary equity initiative: it is foundational to the equity outcomes that Illinois's school improvement agenda depends on achieving.

Category 7: Pathways, Workforce, and the Whole Student

These voices are working on the transitions that matter most: from elementary to secondary school, from high school to college and career, and from learning to life. They are building the systems that allow Illinois students to navigate those transitions with support rather than chance.

41. Edith Njuguna

Illinois Education and Career Success Network

Edith Njuguna is the Executive Director of the Illinois Education and Career Success Network, the organisation that coordinates the state's postsecondary pathway infrastructure and convenes the annual conference bringing together education, workforce, and policy leaders focused on connecting Illinois students' school experience to their career and civic futures. Her 2026 reflections on the Network's vision shaped the direction of that year's conference, which focused on how dual credit, career and technical education, apprenticeships, and credential frameworks can be aligned to serve the full range of Illinois students.

Njuguna's work reflects the increasingly urgent question of what Illinois public education is actually preparing students for, and how honestly the state's K-12 and postsecondary systems communicate with students about the range of pathways available to them. Her convening role within the IECSN positions her as one of the people most responsible for ensuring that the conversations happening in workforce development, community college policy, and K-12 reform are happening together rather than in parallel silos that never touch.

42. Kyle Westbrook

Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University

Kyle Westbrook is the Executive Director of the Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University, the research and technical assistance organisation that supports Illinois schools, districts, and agencies in the design and implementation of evidence-based education improvement strategies. He served as the on-stage conversation partner for the 2025 IECSN conference keynote speaker on equity-centred practices for advancing postsecondary attainment in Illinois. His role at NIU's Education Systems Center positions him as one of the key translational figures in Illinois education: he converts federal and state policy mandates into practical implementation support for the districts, colleges, and community organisations trying to deliver those policies on the ground.

Westbrook's visibility at state-level convenings reflects the kind of behind-the-scenes institutional leadership that shapes what happens in Illinois schools without always receiving the public recognition that more visible district and state leaders receive. The Education Systems Center's work on dual credit policy, career pathways, and postsecondary transitions reflects a sophisticated understanding of the system-level conditions that either make or prevent Illinois students from accessing the opportunities they deserve.

43. Dr. Meagan Mitchell

Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University

Meagan Mitchell is the Pathways Director at the Education Systems Center at NIU, responsible for designing and implementing initiatives that support Illinois's College and Career Pathway Endorsement system, dual credit expansion, and the broader framework for connecting K-12 learning to postsecondary and workforce outcomes. She presented at the 2026 IECSN conference, sharing insights on the current state of dual credit policy in Illinois and the emerging resources, guidance, and administrative rules supporting local implementation. The Dual Credit Quality Act, amended most recently in June 2025, reflects years of work by practitioners and policy advocates to ensure that dual credit in Illinois is not simply an acceleration mechanism for the already-advantaged but a genuine equity tool.

Mitchell's practitioner-level expertise in pathway design and her ability to translate complex state policy into actionable guidance for districts makes her one of the most practically useful voices in the Illinois postsecondary readiness conversation. Her work at the Education Systems Center fills the space between state policy and local implementation that is often where promising reforms lose momentum.

44. Deb Barnett

Southern Illinois Now

Deb Barnett is the Executive Director of Southern Illinois Now, the regional economic development and education advocacy organisation serving the fifteen southernmost counties of Illinois, one of the most economically distressed and chronically under-resourced regions in the state. She participated in the 2026 Illinois Education and Career Success Network Conference as a representative on rural education and workforce development, and her presence in that state-level conversation reflects the importance of keeping southern Illinois's distinctive challenges visible in discussions that are too easily dominated by the priorities of Chicago and its suburbs.

Southern Illinois faces a set of educational challenges that are genuinely distinct from the rest of the state: persistent poverty, rural isolation, geographic distance from higher education institutions, and the long shadow of an economy built on industries that have declined significantly over the past generation. Barnett's work through Southern Illinois Now bridges the gap between education policy and workforce and economic development in ways that the state's education-specific organisations are not always equipped to do.

45. Josh Stafford

Vienna High School

Josh Stafford is the Superintendent of Vienna High School in Johnson County, a small, rural school in the deep south of Illinois that serves a community far removed from the metropolitan school leadership conversations that dominate the Illinois education landscape. He participated in the 2025 and 2026 IECSN conferences, contributing a rural practitioner perspective to conversations about dual credit, apprenticeships, and postsecondary pathways. His willingness to engage with statewide education networks reflects the kind of outward-looking leadership that is critical for rural districts that risk being invisible to the policy makers and funders who shape what resources reach them.

Stafford's context is a useful corrective to the implicit assumption in many Illinois education conversations that the challenges and solutions facing CPS or large suburban districts are universally applicable. Vienna High School operates in a fundamentally different world, with different teacher recruitment challenges, different family engagement dynamics, different college-going cultures, and different economic contexts. His voice reminds the Illinois education conversation that a system that works for 315,000 students in Chicago and fails the children of Vienna has not succeeded.

46. Kimberly Taber

Unit School District 87

Kimberly Taber is the Director of Multilingual and Multicultural Programmes for Unit School District 87 in Bradley, Illinois, in the greater Kankakee area south of Chicago's suburbs. She was featured in a Regional Office of Education spotlight as an educator who has enhanced programming for multilingual students by deepening the district's capacity to serve students whose home languages and cultural identities are not automatically centred in school settings. Her work in a district outside the immediate Chicago metropolitan context reflects the growing multilingual student population across the state.

Taber's expertise in multilingual and multicultural education addresses one of the most practically urgent challenges in Illinois public schools: the gap between the state's growing English Learner population and the availability of educators with the preparation to serve those students well. Her regional presence and her work through the ROE network places her at a productive intersection of local need and statewide conversation about what equitable education for multilingual students actually requires in practice.

47. Laura O'Donnell

Olympia Community Unit School District 16

Laura O'Donnell is the superintendent of Olympia Community Unit School District 16, a rural district in central Illinois near Bloomington-Normal. In 2025, she was selected to serve on the Rural Education Advisory Council with The Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools, a recognition that reflects both her credibility within the rural education community and her commitment to ensuring that rural districts have a voice in the policy conversations that shape education across the state. Rural schools in central Illinois face a distinctive combination of challenges: declining enrolments, constrained tax bases, limited access to specialist educators, and the long-term demographic pressures that result from the economic migration of young families away from smaller communities.

O'Donnell's participation in both local and state-level education networks reflects the kind of engaged rural leadership that is essential to ensuring that the Evidence-Based Funding formula and other statewide reforms deliver their intended benefits to communities like those Olympia CUSD 16 serves. Her voice represents the central Illinois perspective that is frequently underrepresented in conversations dominated by Chicago and its suburban ring.

48. Don Parker

Don Parker Education

Don Parker is an Illinois-based author, speaker, and professional development provider who regularly presents at the Illinois Principals Association conferences and works with school leaders across the state on culture, leadership, and the human dimensions of school improvement that are frequently squeezed out of data-driven professional development contexts. As a full-time educational consultant and speaker operating in Illinois, Parker brings a perspective shaped by working with hundreds of school leaders across many different contexts: suburban and rural, high-performing and turnaround, well-resourced and constrained.

His contribution to the Illinois public education conversation is practical and relational: he is the voice that tells school leaders what they are experiencing is real, that the challenges of building culture while managing operations while meeting state accountability requirements while attending to teacher wellbeing are genuinely difficult and not a reflection of personal inadequacy. That kind of grounded, honest professional development is in shorter supply than the field sometimes acknowledges, and Parker's sustained presence in the Illinois professional learning ecosystem reflects the value school leaders place on it.

49. Phil Januszewski

Phil Januszewski Leadership

Phil Januszewski is a nationally recognised keynote speaker and professional development provider who focuses on supporting the givers in education, the people whose commitment to students and colleagues draws so deeply on their personal reserves that burnout is not a risk but a near-certainty without intentional and structural countermeasures. He presented at the 2025 and 2026 IPA Education Leaders Annual Conferences, making him a recurring and trusted presence in the Illinois school leadership professional development community. His focus on educator flourishing reflects a growing recognition within the Illinois principal community that the wellbeing crisis facing teachers and school leaders is not a personal resilience problem to be solved with meditation apps, but a structural challenge requiring systemic responses.

Januszewski's presence at IPA's major conferences year after year reflects the organisation's deliberate choice to foreground educator wellbeing as a leadership development priority. His work with school leaders on sustaining themselves in one of the most demanding professions in Illinois reflects both an accurate diagnosis of the problem and a practical approach to the kind of school culture and leadership practice that makes sustainable excellence possible over the long term.

50. Charles Williams

Aspire Leadership

Charles Williams is a keynote speaker and leadership educator who opened the 2026 IPA I-Grow Summit with a challenge to traditional definitions of excellence in school leadership, arguing that excellence built on overextension and exhaustion is not excellence at all and that leaders who want to build lasting impact must find models of sustainable, human-centred leadership rather than simply working harder at models that extract rather than grow human capacity. His presentation at one of Illinois's most significant annual school leadership gatherings reflects the currency his ideas have within the Illinois principal community.

His contribution to the Illinois public education thought leadership landscape is philosophical rather than policy-driven or data-oriented, which is precisely why it matters. Illinois school leaders are drowning in data, compliance requirements, and strategic planning frameworks. What they often lack is a clear and compelling articulation of why the way they lead matters for the long-term human flourishing of the people they lead. Williams offers that articulation with the kind of specificity and grounding that moves beyond inspirational rhetoric into the territory of genuine leadership reorientation.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered for this list and were set aside through difficult editorial choices rather than any doubt about the quality of their contributions. Arne Duncan, the former US Secretary of Education who was raised in Chicago and whose career was deeply shaped by his work as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, would appear on almost any list about Illinois public education. His contributions to the national education conversation are foundational and his connection to Illinois is lifelong. We deliberately moved past his name, and those of comparable national figures, to prioritise voices who are actively shaping Illinois public education right now and who may be less familiar to readers who have been following the field for a decade or more.

Jennifer Sullivan, the retired Superintendent of Indian Prairie School District 204, came close to making the list. Her tenure built one of the most innovative large suburban districts in Illinois, and her current work with HYA executive search represents continued influence on who leads Illinois schools. Michael Marassa, the long-serving Chief Technology Officer of New Trier High School District 203, brings decades of practical EdTech leadership from one of Illinois's most resourced and high-profile school contexts, and his IETL board leadership is genuinely valuable to the state. Both were set aside in favour of more active public voices.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Following Illinois Education Thought Leadership

The most common mistake Illinois educators and school leaders make when engaging with thought leadership in this space is treating it as a source of inspiration rather than a source of practical challenge. The people on this list are not offering a catalogue of motivating ideas to consume passively. They are making specific arguments about what is wrong with Illinois public schools, what the evidence says about how to fix it, and who bears responsibility for the work. Reading their content as motivation rather than argument misses most of its value and lets leaders feel engaged with the field without actually being changed by it.

A related mistake is following only the voices who confirm existing views. Illinois public education is a genuinely contested space, and the people doing the most important thinking in it regularly disagree with each other. Robin Steans and the researchers at UIUC approach school funding reform with different tools and sometimes different conclusions. PJ Caposey's emphasis on continuous improvement through district systems and Nick Polyak's emphasis on the relational conditions that make systems work are complementary but not identical. Following only the voices who confirm what you already believe is a way of staying comfortable. Following the voices who challenge your existing frameworks is how thinking actually changes.

Another common mistake is applying thought leadership designed for Chicago-area suburban districts to the very different contexts of downstate, rural, or small-town Illinois schools. The models of leadership development, professional learning, and school culture transformation that work beautifully at Leyden or Stevenson are built for communities with specific resources, demographics, and institutional histories. Josh Stafford and Laura O'Donnell are on this list in part because they are actively working out what those ideas mean in their contexts, and the work of translation is not trivial.

Finally, the most practically costly mistake is treating thought leadership as a substitute for action rather than a preparation for it. The voices on this list are not producing content to be consumed in a passive professional learning exercise. They are producing it to generate enough shared understanding that school leaders, policymakers, and advocates can have the difficult conversations and make the difficult decisions that improve outcomes for Illinois students.

Jonno White works with school leadership teams to facilitate exactly those conversations, helping teams translate what they are learning into the decisions and culture changes that actually move the needle. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Implementation Guide: Building a Learning Practice Around Illinois Education Thought Leadership

The most effective way to engage with the voices on this list is to build a deliberate, regular practice rather than consuming content reactively when it appears in a feed. Start by selecting five to seven voices whose work speaks directly to your current leadership challenge. If you are a principal focused on school culture and educator retention, the voices of Phil Januszewski, Charles Williams, Angela Williams, and Fareeda Shabazz Anderson will offer the most immediately relevant provocation. If you are a district leader focused on equity and resource allocation, Robin Steans, Paul Bruno, and the UIUC researchers will reward sustained attention.

Commit fifteen minutes each week to reading or listening to one piece of content from your selected voices, and five minutes to writing a brief reflection on how what you read connects to a real decision or challenge in your current work. This habit, sustained over twelve months, compounds in ways that occasional conference attendance or intermittent reading never does. Your personal knowledge base grows, your vocabulary for the problems you face becomes more precise, and your sense of who to call or reach out to when a particular challenge arises becomes more specific and practical.

Engage publicly rather than passively. Comment on posts, share content with a genuine reflection on why it matters to your context, and tag colleagues who are working on related challenges. The thought leaders on this list are active on LinkedIn precisely because they want to be in conversation with the practitioners using their ideas, not simply broadcasting at them. That engagement is how ideas from research and policy actually reach the people who can implement them.

Once a term, bring a specific piece of thought leadership content into a formal team discussion. A department meeting, a leadership team debrief, a professional learning community session. Ask: what does this mean for our context? What would we need to change to act on this? What is stopping us? These conversations, facilitated with genuine intent, are where thought leadership becomes organisational learning rather than individual consumption.

Jonno White facilitates exactly this kind of structured leadership team conversation, using tools like Working Genius and DISC to help teams understand why they engage with change the way they do and how to build the shared language that makes action possible. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most influential thought leaders in Illinois public education?

Illinois has an unusually rich ecosystem of education thought leaders spanning state government, district leadership, building leadership, research, policy advocacy, and community organising. Among the most nationally prominent are PJ Caposey, the most published superintendent currently serving in American public education, and Nick Polyak, the 2026 Illinois Superintendent of the Year. Robin Steans of Advance Illinois has shaped state education funding policy more than almost any other individual in Illinois over the past fifteen years. State Superintendent Tony Sanders is the most visible public voice for Illinois's 1.9 million students.

What are the biggest challenges facing Illinois public education right now?

According to Advance Illinois's 2025 State We're In report, Illinois faces a convergence of significant pressures in 2025 and 2026. The expiration of ESSER federal COVID relief funding, which delivered $7.8 billion to Illinois schools between 2020 and 2025, is causing many districts to scale back staffing and services added during the pandemic. Despite significant progress since 2017, 70 percent of Illinois students still attend schools funded below the 90 percent adequacy benchmark established by the Evidence-Based Funding law. Teacher shortages, chronic absenteeism, and persistent achievement gaps for low-income students and students of colour remain serious challenges.

How was this list compiled?

This list was built through a comprehensive review of Illinois educators, researchers, policy advocates, and school leaders who are actively contributing to the public conversation about public education in Illinois in 2025 and 2026. Geographic diversity, disciplinary diversity, and genuine contribution to the field were the primary selection criteria, with a specific effort to surface voices from Central and Southern Illinois as well as the Chicago metropolitan area. The list deliberately includes voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside more established names.

What is the Evidence-Based Funding formula in Illinois?

The Evidence-Based Funding formula, signed into law in 2017, was one of the most significant education policy reforms in Illinois history. It replaced a funding system that had allowed extreme variation in school resources based entirely on local property wealth, with a model that calculates what each district needs to provide an adequate education and then directs new state dollars toward the districts furthest from that adequacy target. Illinois has increased K-12 funding by more than $2.1 billion since the formula was enacted. The statutory goal is for all districts to reach 90 percent of their adequacy target by 2027.

What is the Illinois Principals Association?

The Illinois Principals Association is the primary professional organisation for school principals and school leaders in Illinois. Under the leadership of Executive Director Jason Leahy, IPA has developed the School Leader Paradigm, a research-based framework for principal evaluation and development, launched the Illinois School Leader Pipeline Programme, and hosted annual conferences including the I-Grow Summit and the Education Leaders Annual Conference. IPA is one of the most active state principal associations in the country.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership workshops for my school or district leadership team?

Jonno White works with school leadership teams around the world to facilitate the conversations and decisions that turn good thinking into aligned action. He delivers Working Genius facilitation sessions that help teams understand their collective strengths and frustrations, DISC workshops that improve communication across different leadership styles, and keynote presentations that frame the leadership challenges schools face in ways that generate genuine motivation rather than performative enthusiasm. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in from Brisbane costs less than engaging high-profile local providers. Whether virtual or in-person, email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation.

How do Illinois rural schools differ from urban and suburban schools?

Rural Illinois schools face a distinct constellation of challenges that are not well-captured by the urban-suburban framework that dominates most national education discussion. They operate with smaller staffs, making specialisation in areas like multilingual education, special education, and career and technical education more difficult. They serve communities experiencing the long-term effects of economic and demographic decline, which affects enrolment, local tax revenue, and family stability. And they are frequently invisible to funders, policymakers, and media whose attention is concentrated in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Final Thoughts

Illinois public education contains, in a single state, most of the major challenges and most of the most interesting experiments in American public schooling. It is home to one of the most consequential urban school systems in the country, some of the highest-performing suburban districts in the Midwest, rural communities navigating the slow erosion of the economic foundations that once made those communities viable, and a policy infrastructure that has shown, in the Evidence-Based Funding formula, that it is possible for a state to choose equity deliberately and systematically. Whether that choice is sustained long enough to deliver its promised outcomes is the central question of the next decade of Illinois public education.

The people on this list are not passive observers of that question. They are the people most actively engaged in shaping the answer. Following their work, engaging with their ideas, and bringing their thinking into the leadership conversations happening in your own school or district is one of the most practical investments an Illinois educator can make in the quality of the education their students receive.

To discuss how Jonno White can support your school or district leadership team, whether through Working Genius facilitation, DISC communication workshops, executive team offsites, or keynote presentations for conferences and PD days, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Working Genius has been completed by more than 1.3 million people globally, and Jonno's 93.75 percent satisfaction rating at the 2025 ASBA National Conference reflects the care he brings to every session, whether the team is in Illinois, Brisbane, or anywhere in between.

Jonno White's book Step Up or Step Out: A Guide to Resolving Difficult Conflict has sold over 10,000 copies globally and offers practical tools for the difficult conversations that school leadership teams need to have and often avoid.

Find it on Amazon here.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230-plus episodes reaching listeners in 150-plus countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000-plus participating leaders and achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

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For more on how thought leadership in education translates into practical decision-making and team alignment, read our post on 35 Essential Florida Public Education Thought Leaders.

Florida is the third-largest public school system in the country, and decisions made inside its districts ripple outward at a national scale. When Florida adopted the Best Standards in Mathematics in 2020, eleven other states followed within five years. When Florida wrote its current civics framework, conservative state policy shops across the Midwest borrowed liberally from it. When Florida's reading scores moved on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, every other state superintendent watched.

Keep reading: 35 Essential Florida Public Education Thought Leaders