Excellence at Scale: Taking the Public Education Leadership Project to the Next Level

Taking the Public Education Leadership Project to the Next Level The state of public education in the United States is a perennial hot-button topic, with rhetoric often outpacing any real sense of progress. The Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint initiative of HBS and Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE), seeks to remedy that situation. For the past three years, 72 participants from nine urban school districts have convened at HBS for an annual weeklong executive program. PELP's ultimate goal? To generate ideas about how to enable large urban districts to dramatically improve student achievement regardless of income levels or ethnicity.

"Our objective is to figure out how to crack the code—how to take isolated excellence and spread it across an entire school system."

—Stacey Childress, Lecturer and Cofounder, PELP

"You can find pockets of excellence—great schools in underperforming districts and wonderful classrooms in terrible schools—but we have yet to encounter an urban school district in this country that has achieved excellence at scale," says HBS faculty member Stacey Childress, a cofounder of PELP. "Our objective is to figure out how to crack the code—how to take isolated excellence and spread it across an entire school system."

Professor Allen Grossman, HBS faculty chair, says, "Many of the challenges faced by leaders in K-12 public education are analogous to those in the corporate world. But we also know that management theory requires substantial adaptation and modification when applied in the complex environment of an urban school district. Because the various stakeholder constituencies have competing interests, it can be difficult even getting to square one—that is, reaching agreement that the primary job of a public school is to educate all of the students to their highest potential."

Drawing on insights and proven approaches from the corporate,nonprofit, and education sectors, PELP faculty members are focusing on improving the management of human capital in the education arena. "Every team told us their human resources systems are broken," notes HGSE Professor Robert Schwartz. "Education is a labor— intensive sector, yet for reasons specific to the public education environment, staff training, development, deployment, and compensation are not high priorities for most school districts."

With principal funding from the HBS Class of 1963, PELP operates as a learning laboratory. The nine participating school districts employ in excess of 10,000 people on average and manage annual budgets that average more than $1 billion. They include some of the country's largest cities, including Boston, Chicago, Memphis, and San Francisco.

"What districts haven't figured out yet is how to take the success stories of their top performing schools and spread them to other schools," says Childress. "Chicago has 400,000 students in 600 schools. If you could raise the performance level of a few students in every classroom, at every school, you would impact a lot of kids. When we thought about where PELP could have the most leverage, the challenge of urban districts made sense."

Drawing on insights and proven approaches from the corporate, nonprofit, and education sectors, PELP faculty members are focusing on improving the management of human capital in the education arena.

The districts had free rein in assembling their PELP leadership teams, and the teams were full partners in the knowledge development process with a core group of 10 faculty from HBS and HGSE. The two groups of faculty brought complementary strengths to the partnership, which drew on knowledge about management in the corporate world originating at HBS, coupled with HGSE's understanding of school culture and effective pedagogy. Senior scholars from HBS and HGSE also worked with district leadership teams of eight individuals to develop strategic improvement goals for each year.

The weeklong program was followed during the school year by periodic on-site facilitation involving the district leadership teams, faculty, and research associates. These deep field-based engagements resulted in 21 teaching cases, many of which are available to the wider audience of public education leaders nationwide.

PELP completed its three-year commitment to the initial leadership teams this past summer. In its next phase, while continuing its on-site research and casewriting efforts, the program plans to expand its outreach by offering a weeklong summer session open to teams of leaders from large urban districts, including some that have not previously participated in PELP.

"One of the things we've learned from the districts is that it can be challenging to implement an action plan when more buy-in is needed from colleagues," notes Childress. "If a district sends a dozen or so people each summer to this course-a compilation of the key takeaways from the first three years of PELP—it can really get some penetration in the organization for these new ideas." In this next stage of PELP's life, the long-term goal will remain the same: to generate and communicate ideas that can effect meaningful change in public school systems across the country. For Childress and others who remain committed to PELP, it's a pressing mission.

PELP cases are available through HBS Publishing (www.hbsp.harvard.edu) by searching for "PEL."

PELP Partner Districts	Students	Teachers & Staff (F-T)
Anne Arundel County, Maryland	74,500	8,100
Boston, Massachusetts	57,900	8,302
Charleston, South Carolina	48,500	3,700
Chicago, Illinois	434,400	45,000
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania	7,900	1,100
Memphis, Tennessee	119,000	16,500
Montgomery County, Maryland	146,200	17,900
San Diego, California	132,000	14,555
San Francisco, California	56,236	6,344
Total	1,076,636	121,501