Cities that have seen the greatest gains for students — like Denver, New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Camden — share a common thread: leaders who built the right conditions for great schools to grow. Those conditions don't emerge on their own. Ed City Labs exists to help build them.
In an era of declining enrollment, low institutional trust, AI-powered innovation, and proliferating choice options, traditional school systems must reinvent themselves or risk becoming increasingly obsolete. Cities that embrace a more open, pluralistic approach — where students can choose from a diverse array of options, schools across all sectors are held to high standards, and the system ensures equity of access for all families — will be better positioned to navigate what's coming.
We help city leaders create the environment in which great schools can serve more students over time and ineffective schools are improved or replaced by better options. That discipline — expanding what works, replacing what doesn't — is the through line in every city that has produced lasting gains for kids.
Ed City Labs is launching with three goals we believe are connected: inspiring more cities to pursue this kind of reform, building the civic and funding ecosystems needed to sustain it, and ensuring there are leaders prepared to lead when opportunities emerge. These three things reinforce each other, and neglecting any one of them has historically stalled the work.
We are spending the coming months exploring each of these goals with leaders across the country — asking questions, testing ideas, and finding thought partners before designing solutions we hope to pilot in the fall.
Cities like Indianapolis, New Orleans, Camden, and Denver show what's possible when leaders build the right conditions for great schools to grow. But most cities haven't followed. What incentives work, what policy levers should be replicated, and how can local civic and philanthropic leaders help district leaders choose this path forward?
What kind of infrastructure would foster connections between cities, enable funders to share lessons across markets, and pull more local and regional funders into this work? How could a network of local and regional funders break down silos, engage in coordinated dialogue, deepen connections with national funders, and serve as a hub of best practice for the funder field?
System change is accelerated by great leaders — but those leaders need to be ready when the political window opens, not recruited after the fact. How can we identify and support the next generation of values-aligned district leaders? Should we grow existing communities of practice, build new partnerships with talent programs, or both?
Ethan Gray is the founder of Ed City Labs. Before launching Ed City Labs, he was a founding partner at City Fund, where he led strategy and grantmaking in Denver, Albuquerque, and several other cities from 2018 to 2026. Before City Fund, he founded Education Cities, a national network of 33 city-based civic and funding organizations in 25 cities dedicated to creating the conditions for great public schools to flourish.
Earlier in his career, Ethan served as Vice President of The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, where he helped develop the Creating Opportunity Schools plan for transforming Indianapolis Public Schools.
Ed City Labs carries forward twenty years of field experience, relationships, and hard-won lessons about what it actually takes to build an ed city. The organization is supported by an extended network of practitioners, funders, and civic leaders who have spent decades doing this work in cities across the country.