Chris Gabrieli

Chris Gabrieli

CEO and Co-Founder, Empower Schools
Chairman, Massachusetts Board of Higher Education
Co-Founder, Transforming Education
Chris Gabrieli
Chris Gabrieli is the CEO of Empower Schools, Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, and a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He has been at the forefront of several movements to expand educational opportunity and improve schooling including his longtime leadership of the Massachusetts and national movement to expand learning time for disadvantaged students. Empower Schools partners with communities to help them get the schools they want with the results their students need. Empower partnered with the Mayor and School Committee of Salem, MA to address their lowest performing school – in just two years, that school, now a highly-autonomous school within the district, has soared from Level 4 to Level 1 and from the 3rd percentile in the state to the 24th. In Springfield, MA, Empower partnered with the Springfield Public Schools, the Springfield Education Association and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) to form the groundbreaking Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (SEZP) which is responsible for rapidly improving educational outcomes for over 4,000 middle grade students (80% of Springfield students at those grades) in New England’s second largest district. More recently, Springfield turned to the SEZP to also take on the turnaround for 1,400 high school students at another Springfield school. Chris is Chairman of the SEZP Board. Empower has also launched a Zone in partnership with the Denver, CO Public Schools and is in dialogue with other communities in MA and beyond about the potential of Zones to empower their educators. Early on in its existence, Empower founders helped organize, design and launch the nationally heralded turnaround of the Lawrence Public Schools. Chris is a Partner Emeritus at Bessemer Venture Partners where he helped entrepreneurs build biotechnology and healthcare companies and began his business career as the founder and CEO of GMIS, a medical software company that became the leader in its field and a publicly traded company. Chris has been active in civic and political life in Massachusetts including winning the Democratic primary for Lt. Governor in 2002 and coming in second in the Democratic primary for Governor in 2006. Chris and his wife live in Boston where they have raised five children, the oldest of whom is now an elementary school teacher in the Hartford, CT public schools.