Back in 2011, when Melissa Zaikos (MBA 2000) first began digging deeply into the standardized test scores of the Chicago Public Schools system, she saw that elementary schools seemed to be getting better in the Chicago area. But once students reached middle and high school, the gap between the high-achieving students and those who needed academic support grew considerably. A report from Stanford University a few years later confirmed her observations. “Chicago had made a lot of progress in elementary schools,” says Zaikos, “but high school was really hard to crack.”

Zaikos was ready for the challenge. In 2012, she launched the Intrinsic Schools, a network of public charter schools with an innovative approach to the middle school and high school experience. Rather than employ the data from standardized tests and apply it to a school or grade or classroom en masse, Intrinsic uses the data to individualize student learning.

The result was a pilot school on West Belmont Ave in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago made up of large, open-classroom spaces called “Pods” for traditional class periods, each holding up to 60 students and broken into subjects based on students’ personal learning data in any given subject. Three teachers support each classroom, and the setup allows them to be flexible with student learning without creating individualized lesson plans for each of the 1,000 students enrolled at Intrinsic.

For Intrinsic, this isn’t just about high school success; it’s about success well beyond those four years. Ninety-two percent of the class of 140 students graduated, and 91 of Intrinsic’s Class of 2019 took that step into postsecondary education, with at least 43 percent graduating with early college credits. Intrinsic’s success led to a second campus in a downtown Chicago high-rise in the fall of 2019, giving even more of the city’s students the chance to experience a tailored high school public education.

For Zaikos, the mission is personal, having spent most of her life in Chicago and raised her own kids there. She’s passionate about making the city better, she says, and knows education is one of the primary ways to improve it. “I was very much drawn to working in education. It’s been incredibly gratifying to be able to bring the leadership and management skills I learned at HBS to help grow this inspiring, innovative, and tight-knit community of students, families, staff, and other partners. I am proud of our collective efforts and how we tackle challenges and celebrate wins. There is no place I’d rather be.”

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