Harvard To Teach K-12 School Administrators

Over the next three years, administrators from urban school districts across the country will learn management techniques at Harvard as part of a $3 million program to improve public education.

Faculty from Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE), the sponsors of the project—called the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)—will also travel to the school districts to serve as advisers and to assess the school districts’ performance.

HBS and GSE announced the formation of the program—which will focus on K-12 school districts in Boston, Chicago, Charleston, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Francisco and suburban areas in Maryland and Pennsylvania—last week. The districts’ enrollment totals about one million students.

The HBS Class of 1963 contributed a $3 million class gift for their 40th reunion to the project. Each school district will also contribute $30,000.

“There’s been a growing focus in our country about the state of public education, particularly our large urban school districts, which hasn’t just suddenly happened here at Harvard,” said Stacey M. Childress, a senior researcher at HBS who is managing PELP.

“There’s been a heightened awareness in our society about the need to focus on the problems associated with urban schooling,” she added.

PELP will seek to tackle problems of limited financial and human resources, difficult political environments and achievement gaps between middle-class and affluent students in public schools, Childress said.

The project has been in the works for two years. Faculty members from HBS and GSE have been working together to study how management techniques in the non-profit business sector could improve the operation of school districts.

While there is intensive debate about what and how schools are teaching students across the country, there is not enough focus on managing public school systems, according to Allen S. Grossman, professor of management practice at HBS, who will serve on the faculty of PELP.

“There are good schools within an urban school system. But there’s no theory about how to take those schools and spread the practice. There’s no real theory on how to attract, retain and motivate personnel within a school district. There’s no real theory on how to use data to manage people for more effectiveness,” Grossman said.

The ultimate goal of PELP, he said, is to combine knowledge from the non-profit, business, and other sectors with input from the education sector to develop a body of knowledge on how to make schools more effective.

After the three years, PELP may continue to work to improve those school districts or focus on a new set of public schools across the United States.