Harvard Alumni Preparing Leaders for Urban Schools
Social Enterprise Newsletter, Spring 2001
When the start-up organization New Leaders for New Schools was named a semifinalist in last year's HBS Business Plan Contest, its five cofounders turned a lot of heads. Not only did their fledgling enterprise have a social mission, but it also was the first nonprofit to be honored in this way. Today, New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS) is poised to begin carrying out its mission of identifying, training, and placing talented individuals with the potential to be successful principals in urban public schools.
Ben Fenton (MBA '00), Jon Schnur, and Monique Burns (MBA '93) of NLNS are working to foster a new breed of urban school principals.
As policy advisor on K-12 education in the Clinton administration and the Gore presidential campaign, Jon Schnur, now CEO of NLNS, traveled all over the United States visiting urban public schools and learning, as he says, that "every great school that was educating kids from all backgrounds at high levels had an outstanding principal." Yet half of the nation's urban school districts report shortages of qualified principals, and 40 percent of today's principals are eligible to retire within the next few years.
At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where he is currently a master's degree candidate, and at HBS, where he has taken courses, Schnur began meeting like-minded individuals who believed they could help solve this problem. One of these people was Monique Burns (MBA '93), NLNS's president and chief curriculum officer. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while working as an assistant brand manager at Quaker Oats, Burns tutored children at Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing development. She also served as a volunteer aide to a principal in a Chicago public school, where, she says, "I saw that management skills and leadership were clearly needed in education."
After earning her MBA, Burns worked with the educational consulting firm The McKenzie Group to help open four public middle schools in Washington, D.C., and eventually served as assistant principal of one of them. She then headed for Philadelphia, where, as special assistant to the superintendent of schools, she became involved in planning and implementing systemwide reform. "What became clear right away," she relates, "was that school reform was going to depend on the instructional leadership provided by the principals." Now researching the skills possessed by successful charter-school principals as a doctoral candidate at HGSE, Burns has also been learning that successful urban public school principals need entrepreneurial abilities.
A third member of NLNS's founding team, Chief Operating Officer Ben Fenton (MBA '00), also came to social enterprise by way of more conventional business. During stints at McKinsey & Co. and Fisher Scientific, a major science products distributor, he gained experience in both operations and marketing. At HBS, Fenton was inspired by the elective Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector, where he met his future team members. "The course showed me a whole set of ways I could bring my business skills into a very different environment," he observes.
At McKinsey, Fenton learned about the importance of great leadership in organizations. So when he met Burns, Schnur, and NLNS's two other cofounders (then HGSE students Allison Gaines and Mike Johnston), he found their ideas about school principals "very understandable to a businessperson."
Today, NLNS's plans are ambitious but, its leaders say, realistic. By July 2002, the organization plans to have recruited, trained, and placed a total of 15 public school principals in two cities, Chicago and New York. By the summer of 2003, NLNS intends to double that number in Chicago and New York while also launching a program in a third city. Within ten years, it hopes to be training 500 principals a year in a total of 16 cities.
Fenton, meanwhile, acknowledges that attaining such goals will require significant amounts of funding — over $3 million just to cover curriculum development, the 15-trainee pilot program in Chicago and New York, and start-up costs for a third city. In the NLNS business plan, participating school districts will cover the costs of stipends and benefits for New Leaders Fellows during their year of training, while private donations will fund trainers and mentors for Fellows as well as salaries for locally based NLNS staff, who will be responsible for fundraising from local sources.
All of this amounts to a major challenge for a young nonprofit organization, but one that the NLNS leadership is confident it can meet. With $2.6 million in commitments from early donors and strategic partners already in hand, NLNS is finding backers who share its faith. "With the willingness of our current funders to take a risk," says Fenton, "we've been given the luxury of trying out a model that we believe in, and that many in the education community also believe in."
In March, the HBS Business Plan Contest offered the first Social Enterprise Track. Eleven teams entered. A complete report will appear in the next issue of Social Enterprise.