In 2003, faculty members from Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Education launched the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) to create and disseminate knowledge about how to manage urban school districts. The PELP team strives to identify effective leadership and management practices to support large-scale organizational change in urban school districts with the ultimate hope of improving teaching and learning for all students.
Just Released
Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership
Edited by Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen Grossman, and Susan Moore Johnson
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders.
The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.