Steven Zimmerman is the founder of CPICS. Steve has founded two charter schools in Queens—Our World Neighborhood Charter School, where he served as board chairman for five years and, most recently, Academy of the City Charter School. He was an elementary school teacher in the inner-city of Chicago during the Model Cities Program years and later worked for 15 years in educational publishing, first as a science editor and later as principal of BookLinks, a company that provides ESL, bilingual and design services for US school publishers. Steve is also the founder an educational technology startup and has spent the last several years working on a digital collaborative tool for authentic assessment.