CIE Organizational Effectiveness

Of the organizational capacity areas you considered above, what is your organization’s top priority? How would you use the OE funds, and why for this project as opposed to other priorities? Our top priority is to better understand and design for the unique value that we can bring to the field. As a relatively young organization, CIE has a unique approach to “leading with learning” that leverages intellectual, social, and political capital to help states, districts, and their partners pursue strategies that improve outcomes for all students and improve the performance of their systems. CIE was established in 2013 with joint funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as Gene Wilhoit, the CEO, was leaving the Council of Chief State School Officers as Executive Director. Since then, CIE has received both general operating support as well as programmatic grants from both foundations. By design, we maintain a small footprint as a minimally viable organization, but strive for outsized impact through partnering and collaborations. Virtually all of our funding expires in December 2018, which provides unique opportunity to develop our organization to more closely align with our next generation of work while staying true to mission, values and ethics. This milestone also provides opportunity to consider what form the organization should take since, increasingly, placement within the university is constraining our ability to act. It is time to develop an organizational and financial sustainability plan that positions us to build capacity while acting strategically so that we can influence systems in more sustaining ways. We will use the majority of these funds to secure the services of an external design partner(s) and who can help us conduct a self-assessment of our current internal capacity and impact to date, help us gather and make sense of feedback from others to assess the impact of our work to date, solicit input from key stakeholders and other organizations working in this space on how the they view us as an organization and what they perceive the field will need from us, and then conduct our own assessment of what the totality of that information tells us about the future of the organization. That information and will help us in two major ways: • In the short-term, we will be able to make adjustments that increase our potential external impact and be better able to assess the strategic value of potential partnerships and opportunities • For the longer-term, and most importantly, we will be able to design an organizational and financial plan for sustaining CIE beyond 2018 that is very future-oriented and tightly aligned with how we see education and learning evolving to serve all kids.