PELP Executive Education Program

July 8 -13, 2012

The Public Education Leadership Program is designed for teams of eight participants, including district office personnel, school principals, and regional supervisors, who are responsible for school systems with at least 30,000 enrolled students.

Learn more about this year's program here!

Testimonials

The environment at PELP creates a very unique and special forum for school district leaders. The most valuable elements of the program are the experiences with world-class faculty, time together as a district team, and time with other districts--away from the day-to-day demands of our district jobs. It helped us define what success would look like and got us thinking about goals and strategy. We've come a long way as a district and the PELP experience has had a lot to do with our progress.

Arne Duncan - Superintendent, Chicago Public Schools


PELP is boot camp for leadership development. You are well-taken care of, but challenged all the way. The case study approach forces you out of your comfort zone, provokes you to analyze problems from a variety of perspectives, set a coherent strategy and identify tactical means that allow you to achieve that strategic end. The food is great. The campus is beautiful. And the people you meet are unforgettable. In the end, you leave believing that making school districts better for teaching kids is truly possible.

Bill Green - Superintendent, Minneapolis Public Schools


PELP was a really good opportunity for people working from different vantage points in our district to reflect on their responsibilities within the whole system. The conversations that we had at PELP were so important in the sense that we've continued to talk about shared leadership, planning, implementing goals at every level within the system, and defining what we want our schools' cultures to be. We've also seen how a focused analysis of our organization's systems and structures can enable continuous improvement in our professional development, curriculum design, instructional accountability and organizational design. PELP is really trying to address some of the most pressing issues in U.S. education--the program's value cannot be overstated.

Kevin Maxwell - Superintendent, Anne Arundel County School District


At PELP we found that the community superintendents - as terrific as they are - operated in isolation. They were doing their own thing! So we came up with something called a monitoring protocol and calendar. It delineates our data point foci for each month; highlighting the questions we ask the schools about their student progress, action plans to meet targets, and a timeline for getting the important work done. There are separate monitoring protocols for each level; elementary, middle, and high schools. Systematically pulling these together for consistent implementation across the district was a great challenge I gave to the community superintendents - they never disappoint me.

Freida Lacey - Deputy Superintendent of Schools, Montgomery County Public Schools


Another byproduct of PELP is that it validates you. When you go there you think, oh my gosh, I'm worthy of this rich professional development? This is really, really nice. And people went out of their way to do this for me? I think other educators need to experience that. It really validates you as being important in the field of education and important in the country, to children.

Patricia Toarmina - Director of Exceptional Children, Memphis City Schools


There are a lot of union locals that don't want to perceive their relationship with management as being anything other than confrontational. That's discouraging, but probably accurate. At the same time, though, I got to sit down and talk to a number of people at the case study meetings, the classes, but also in other settings as well, and I felt I was able to tell them a little bit about the work that we're doing, and help them understand how they might be able to approach working with unions in their school system a little more productively. That was quite gratifying.

Doug Prouty - Vice President Montgomery County Educational Association, Montgomery County Public Schools