Please join EMILY KRONE PHILLIPS for the launch of The Make-or-Break Year. She will be in discussion with Chicago Public Schools Chief Equity Officer and former Tilden principal Maurice Swinney and John Q. Easton of the University of Chicago Consortium for School Research. This panel will be moderated by Stephanie Banchero, Education Program Director of The Joyce Foundation.

MAURICE SWINNEY is the Chief Equity Officer of Chicago Public Schools. He is formerly the principal of Tilden Career Academy in Fuller Park on the South Side and former associate principal at St. Amand High School in Ascension Parish, Louisiana.

JOHN Q. EASTON is a Senior Fellow at the UChicago Consortium. Prior, he served as Vice President, Programs at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. He was affiliated with the UChicago Consortium in its inception in 1990, and became its Deputy Director in 1997 and Executive Director in 2002. John also served as Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Educaiton, under President Obama. He is a member of the Illinois Employment Security Advisory Board, the Illinois Longitudinal Data System Tehcnical Advisory Committee, and the Chicago Public Schools' School Quality Report Card Steering Committee.

STEPHANIE BANCHERO is the Joyce Foundation's Education Program Director on the Education and Economic Mobility team. Before coming to Joyce, Stephanie was national education reporter for The Wall Street Journal and, before that, spent 13 years covering K-12 Education for The Chicago Tribune. Her nationally recognized reporting has received first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association and the Missouri School of Journalism. She also received the Harry Chapin Media Award and an honorable mention from the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families. She was awarded a prestigious one-year Knight Fellowship in journalism at Stanford University.