Phillip Jackson

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See also: Philip Jackson (actor)

Phillip Jackson (born September 22, 1950 in Chicago, IL) has had a diverse career including serving as Senior Vice President of Kroch’s & Brentano’s; Assistant Budget Director for the City of Chicago; Deputy Chief of Staff, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Chief of Staff of the Chicago Public Schools; Chief Executive Officer for the Chicago Housing Authority; Chief of Education for the City of Chicago; and Founder and Executive Director of The Black Star Project. Throughout these experiences, the theme of his work continues to be providing opportunities for and improving the life quality of others.

Born in 1950 in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, Phillip Jackson moved frequently as a child, attending 11 different Chicago public schools over the course of his 13 years in that system. After receiving a Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy, with honors, from Roosevelt University in 1974, he was quickly promoted from stock clerk to assistant manager at Kroch’s and Brentano’s Book Stores, where he had been employed since 1969. During his 24-year career with Chicago’s oldest bookstore chain he climbed to the position of Senior Vice President of Operations. He helped build and manage the company but parted ways with the other executives when they turned on the employees, denying them their hard earned pensions. Motivated by these injustices, Phillip led, financed and won a class-action lawsuit that restored pensions to wrongfully terminated employees. After leaving Kroch’s & Brentano’s, he worked in the Office of Budget and Management for the City of Chicago and became Assistant Budget Director in six months. In the Budget Office, he led the Quick-Pay taskforce that took action to make sure that all vendors (especially minority owned enterprises) doing business with the City of Chicago were paid in a timely and proper fashion.

In 1995 he joined the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) transition team with Paul Vallas. During his five-year tenure he served as Deputy Chief of Staff, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Chief of Staff. He helped CPS achieve the highest number of contracts in Chicago history with businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos, and Women. As the director of intergovernmental affairs, Phillip Jackson managed a team that secured millions of dollars in grant funds for new construction and renovation projects, as well as innovative educational initiatives. During his tenure at the Chicago Public Schools, Phillip became acutely aware of the racial academic achievement gap, both in Chicago and nationwide, and eventually decided to enter the non-profit sector in order to address this problem. In 1996 he founded The Black Star Project to address this issue.

In 1999 he became the CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). During his dynamic stewardship of the CHA, Jackson negotiated a $1.6 billion deal with the federal government to transform public housing in Chicago with a focus on residents’ quality of life and not just the bricks and mortar. Following this concept, Phillip Jackson spent time working to improve the living conditions in public housing for the youth residents, he even made certain that all children received gifts of books around the holiday season. His hands-on approach included driving to every building multiple times each week to talk with residents and to take note of the status of the grounds and repairs. He designed an award-winning summer school from which 92% of failed 8th-grade participants made sufficient summer progress to be promoted to high school. The average success rate for the same population citywide hovered around 63%.

In 2000 he moved to the Office of the Mayor for the City of Chicago, where he served as Chief of Education. There he implemented the first citywide parent empowerment conference.

After serving as President and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago for one year, he elected in 2002 to devote himself fulltime to the organization he founded in 1996, The Black Star Project.

As the Executive Director of The Black Star Project, he has become a national leader advocating for community involvement in education and the importance of parental development to ensure that children are properly educated. The Black Star Project has served close to 100,000 students in over 175 schools since 1996 in its Student Motivation Program and between 3,000 to 4,000 parents in its parent outreach programs since 2004. This year, Phillip Jackson and The Black Star Project lead the nation back to school with the hugely successful Million Father March 2005. This second annual back-to-school march encouraged men to take children to school on the first day, marking a commitment to a year of positive male involvement in education. Marches took place at schools in 82 cities around the country and even in Auckland, New Zealand([1]).


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