Job Description

BACKGROUND Twenty years ago, when educators and community members started the charter school movement, people questioned whether students in low-income communities could succeed at the highest levels. That debate is now over. They can, and they do, as evidenced by the high school graduation rates and post-secondary success of thousands of Illinois charter school students. The only remaining question is whether we have the will to make this happen for more families. That is the work we are committed to.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools (INCS) advocates for improving public education by leveraging the charter school model as a catalyst to transform lives and communities. INCS works to ensure that charter public schools have adequate and equitable resources, the autonomy to find innovative approaches to meet student needs, and a fair and transparent policy landscape that allows high-quality options to thrive. As the voice of Illinois charter schools, INCS engages a diverse coalition of policy-makers, school leaders, parents, and community members to create systemic change and secure high-quality schools for underserved communities.

INCS has distinguished itself as a powerful catalyst for creating and sustaining high-quality charter schools and education reform in Illinois. Charter advocacy work in Illinois is particularly compelling given the charter school movement's legislative victories in recent years, which lifted the state's cap on charter public schools from 60 to 120 charters, created an authorizing commission independent of school districts, and increased the allowable renewal term from five to ten years for high performing charter schools.

The charter community needs an advocate to ensure policy-makers and families know accurate facts about charter schools and understand their valuable contributions to Illinois communities and the health of our state's public-school ecosystem. INCS is that advocate. INCS' Data Analyst will be a crucial asset in this effort, setting a strategy for how INCS will leverage quantitative and qualitative findings of charter schools to drive a policy environment that supports the sustainability of charter schools to transform lives and communities across Illinois and overseeing the organization's data and information-sharing platforms to achieve sustainable results in team operations.

INCS makes its impact through several program teams: Government Affairs, Charter Growth and Support, Data and Policy, and Communications. The organization is based in Chicago, where the majority of Illinois' charter schools are located.

THE SEARCH We are looking for a passionate Data Analyst. The successful candidate will turn data into information, information into insight, and insight into business decisions. As a member of the External Affairs team, the Data Analyst is primarily responsible for the analysis of school quality and enrollment data for all Illinois charter schools. The Data Analyst will equip the INCS team, INCS' member schools, and influential stakeholders with data tools and research findings that will boost their efforts to impact education policy and improve school quality for students throughout Illinois. In addition, the Data Analyst leads the development and implementation of all INCS research projects, including community surveys, issue briefs, and focus groups, to support the overall strategy.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES • Maintain and update database of charter school performance data:

• Maintain and continue to improve the INCS charter performance database, incorporating new sources as they become available from Chicago Public Schools, Illinois State Board of Education, and other state and local agencies.
• Install new functionality on the INCS website through Tableau software and connection to the server.
• Streamline data systems at INCS to reduce the burden of updating, eliminate redundancies, and make school data more accessible to staff.
• Build dashboards in relevant platforms, such as Tableau, Excel, or PowerPoint, to support INCS teams in their work.

• Equip INCS teams with timely and relevant data analysis:

• Update data points on the INCS website, in INCS literature, and other staff resource documents with up-to-date information from database and reporting platforms.
• Create one-pagers and PowerPoints summarizing performance and enrollment trends for INCS' advocacy team.
• Support Development team with relevant data points for competitive grant processes.

• Serve as a master engineer and staff support for CRM database (e.g., Salesforce), housing development, program, communications, and stakeholder interaction data:

• Understand, support, and address the business needs of all INCS staff members with regard to the INCS CRM database.
• Maintain seamless integration between CRM, email marketing, event registration, social media, and accounting software.
• Help staff design and implement protocols for capturing pertinent stakeholder interaction data that is not otherwise captured in one of our data systems.
• Build and maintain reports that support user adoption and accountability.
• Serve as the champion for the organization's use of CRM, building buy-in, supporting evolving staff needs, and training new and existing staff on an as-needed basis about the functionality in the CRM database.
• Serve as liaison between CRM customer support resources and the end-users.

• Manage the maintenance of the INCS website, including developing new web pages and updating content:

• Lead quarterly review of INCS website content with staff, ensuring each page features current data and content.
• Liaise with INCS' external website hosting team to ensure functionality and regular WordPress backend maintenance.
• Regularly update INCS job board.

• Supervise development and implementation of INCS research projects, including community surveys, focus groups, and issue briefs:

• Maintain and improve current data collection processes across the team.
• Conduct original research and drive analysis for INCS issue briefs, exploring topics relevant to the charter public school community.
• Track and manage the implementation of INCS data collection projects, including survey work and focus groups.

• Serve as a leader in the charter data community:

• Lead INCS data working group, a collaborative space for data professionals in the charter community.
• Serve as a resource for charter schools on individual and sector performance through one-on-one meetings and community-wide professional development sessions.
• Write monthly summaries of new data reports and publications for inclusion in INCS' President's Report.

EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS First and foremost, candidates must believe that every child, regardless of socioeconomic factors or their academic starting point has the potential to succeed in school, career, and life. In addition, candidates must believe in the power of charter schools to leverage sustainable improvement on the public education system overall. Additional requirements include:

REQUIRED:

• Undergraduate degree (Sociology, Statistics, Data Analytics), Master's preferred
• Experience with relational database design and maintenance
• Proficient in R, SQL, and Tableau
• Advanced Excel and MS Office Suite
• Experience with website management and WordPress hosting
• Highly organized with excellent attention to detail and ability to independently manage multiple projects at once
• High expectations and focused on results
• Orientation toward customer service and problem-solving
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work independently as a highly organized self‐starter
• Mature outlook and presence, sense of humor, relentless optimism, a spirit of problem-solving, and calm under pressure

PREFERRED:

• Three to five years of experience in a relevant field
• Education/charter school experience
• Experience in computer science, data modeling/management, and/or statistics

CULTURAL COMPETENCY AT INCS Cultural competency is a lifelong process of building the knowledge, mindset, and skills necessary to engage fully and effectively with students, colleagues, and stakeholders of different backgrounds. This process requires us to deeply understand our nation's history of injustice and its link to the persistent opportunity gaps that INCS and its member schools are focused on closing. It also requires us to strengthen our cultural competency by better understanding our own implicit and explicit biases and by reflecting on our words and actions through open dialogue.

INCS invests in building greater cultural competence and responsiveness across our team by supporting ongoing reflection, learning, skill-building, and positive actions. We know that culturally competent teams, especially when inclusive of individuals who share the racial, socioeconomic, and/or academic backgrounds (e.g., first-generation college-goers) of member schools' student populations, are best equipped to take action to ensure fairness inside and outside of INCS. To that end, we believe in building a richly diverse and inclusive organization, including a mission-critical imperative for all staff to both models and contribute to the vision we hope to achieve.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INCS believes it is critical for leaders to reflect the communities that they serve, and that diversity across multiple dimensions enables us to achieve our mission of transforming lives and communities through public education. We don't just accept difference we celebrate it, support it, and thrive on it for the benefit of our staff, member schools, and the broader community. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and seek and welcome a diverse pool of candidates in this search.

Company Description

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools advocates for the improvement of public education by leveraging the charter school model as a catalyst to transform lives and communities. As the voice of Illinois charter schools, INCS engages a diverse coalition of policymakers, school leaders, parents, and community members to create systemic change and secure high-quality schools for underserved communities.