Chris Maher

Chris Maher serves as the Superintendent-in-Residence at Cambiar Education, where his primary focus is to support the Cambiar Catalyst Fellowship, a diverse national selective fellowship for K-12 systems leaders committed to improving outcomes for all students through inclusivity, ingenuity and impact. In addition, Maher leads partnerships with school districts, non-profit organizations, and education entrepreneurs to authentically engage their stakeholders in the co-creation of solutions to entrenched challenges and to identify opportunities to increase their impact. Maher has had the privilege to coach superintendents, executive teams, and other systems leaders for nearly a decade.

Prior to joining Cambiar, Maher served for four years as Superintendent in Providence, where he restructured the district to increase resources for schools, reduced out-of-school suspensions, worked with teachers to increase the use of high-quality instructional materials, decreased the number of schools identified as low-performing, partnered with student leadership to implement policy changes, created policies to protect transgender students and staff, increased mental health support for students, and led the advocacy that provided state funding for multilingual learners for the first time in the state’s history.

Maher has worked in a number of different roles in his career in education, as a teacher, principal, district administrator, public school advocate, and in other leadership capacities.