Jean-Claude Brizard

Who is Jean-Claude Brizard?

Jean-Claude Brizard is a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Directly before coming to Chicago, he served as the superintendent of the Rochester City School District. He started his career as a teacher, then an administrator, in the New York School System.

Brizard was born an hour north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Dictator François Duvalier had his grandfather imprisoned and his parents fled to the United States when it was learned his father might be imprisoned as well. After reuniting with his family, Brizard attended public schools in Brooklyn and earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and a master’s degree in Science Education from Queens College and a master’s degree in School Administration and Supervision from the City College of New York.

He began his career as an instructor at Rikers Island, later moving to George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, where he taught physics and became principal in 1999. In 2003 he rose to the instructional superintendency of Region 8, New York City Department of Education. He attended the Superintendents’ Academy of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems in 2007.

In 2008, he assumed the superintendency of the Rochester City School District. In Rochester, he promoted charter schools and merit pay, pushed for performance standards, and met with so much opposition from the teachers’ union that they gave him a vote of no confidence before he left for Chicago.