Resources

K-12 Education

In recognition of the enormous challenges in public education, faculty members from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education launched the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) in 2003. This collaborative project is examining how effective leadership and management practices in the business and nonprofit sectors can be adapted to large urban school districts. Over the past four years, the PELP research team has engaged in extensive field research and has written approximately 30 cases and articles.

Books

Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership. Edited by Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen Grossman, and Susan Moore Johnson. (Paperback). Boston: Harvard Education Press, 2007.

Select Articles and Working Papers

Stacey Childress, Richard Elmore, and Allen Grossman. “How to Manage Urban School Districts,” Harvard Business Review (November 2006).
Stacey Childress, Richard Elmore, and Allen Grossman. “Promoting a Management Revolution in Public Education,” HBS Working Knowledge (July 5, 2006).
David Thomas. “Writing the Case for Public School Reform,” HBS Working Knowledge (May 8, 2006)

Search HBS Working Knowledge for cutting–edge research by HBS faculty related to education.

Search Harvard Business School’s faculty publications and research interest databases on education.

Select Cases and Notes

“Bristol City Schools” (BCS) (9-PEL-001)
Richard Elmore, Allen Grossman, and Modupe Akinola
“Joel Klein and Leadership in the NYC Public Schools” (9-407-065)
Chris Marquis, Abby Larson, Doug Guthrie, and Richard Arum
“Managing at Scale in the Long Beach Unified School District” (9-PEL-041)
James E. Austin, Robert B. Schwartz, Jennifer M. Suesse, and Allen Grossman
“Pursuing Educational Equity: Aligning Resources at San Francisco Unified School District” (9-PEL-005)
Stacey Childress and Robert Peterkin
“The STAR Schools Initiative at the San Francisco Unified School District” (PEL039)
Jennifer M. Suesse and Stacey Childress

Search Harvard Business School Publishing for articles and cases on education.

Related Events

“Perspectives from the Field: Education”. A panel discussion moderated by HBS Lecturer and Senior Researcher Stacey Childress, as part of the HBS Industry Week Alumni Panel series (October 30, 2007).
“Why Improving the Cost and Quality of Health Care & Public Education Has Been Intractable and How to Address These Challenges”. A Social Enterprise Initiative faculty seminar with Clayton M. Christensen, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration (September 26,2007).
Public Education Leadership Conference (June 2007).
“The Leadership Challenge: Transforming the New York Department of Education”. A conversation with Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, at the 2007 HBS Social Enterprise Alumni Association Conference, "The Social Sector (R)evolution." Moderated by Nan Stone of Bridgespan (March 3, 2007).
“Stepping Up to Leadership”. A conversation with Wendy Kopp, President and Founder, Teach For America (September 7, 2006).

MBA Courses

Entrepreneurship in Education Reform (Second Year, Winter Term)
Senior Lecturer Stacey Childress
Entrepreneurship in Education Reform (EER) is an elective course for second year MBA students and crossregistrants who are interested in creating, leading, or supporting education enterprises with the purpose of driving higher levels of academic achievement for all K–12 students in the United States. The course architecture is driven by the following questions: 1.Why is there an entrepreneurial opportunity in a sector that is publicly funded and historically has been publicly delivered? 2. In what specific areas of the sector are opportunities arising and why? 3.What possibilities and constraints are faced by entrepreneurs across all the opportunity areas? 4. How might we evaluate the effectiveness of the entrepreneurial approaches at work in the sector? EER challenges students to consider these questions by examining the complexities of the existing education system, the strategies of entrepreneurial organizations that are attempting to address root causes of the performance problems in urban education, and the entrepreneurial behavior of leaders and managers trying to affect systemic change in both traditional and new types of public schools.

Executive Education Programs

Public Education Leadership Program (PELP) 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. Participants explore how to develop, communicate, and implement a strategy that achieves excellence across all school districts by examining the management and leadership best practices in successful school districts, businesses, and nonprofit organizations.