Faculty & Research
Pursuing System–Level Change in U.S. Public Education
Stacey Childress
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Joanne Weiss
Senior Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education and Director, Race to the Top
Date and Time: Monday, December 7, 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Location: Cumnock 102
To register: Please RSVP to sefs@hbs.edu
Description: America's public education system should fuel the country's global competitiveness and ensure socio–economic mobility from one generation to the next, but evidence suggests the system is failing on both counts. Systemic solutions have been scarce, but this is changing. Some cities are building cross–sector partnerships to drive improvement. The federal Department of Education (DOE) recently launched the Race to the Top (RTTT), a $4.35 billion competitive grant program to create incentives for cross–sector collaboration within states to dramatically increase student performance. The seminar will begin with short presentations on the transformation underway in New Orleans and the DOE's RTTT competition. The remainder of the session will be an interactive discussion of the implications the examples could have for other efforts to create system–level impact in education as well as other areas of social change.
Biographies:
Stacey Childress: Stacey Childress is a Senior Lecturer in the General Management unit at Harvard Business School, and a cofounder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. Stacey studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States and has written more than two dozen cases on the topic. Her forthcoming book, Transforming Public Education: Cases in Education Entrepreneurship, builds on this work. She is also a coauthor of Leading for Equity (2009) and Managing School District for High Performance (2007) with colleagues from Harvard's business and education schools.
