The Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University (PELP) is a joint initiative of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Business School, with a mission to improve the management and leadership competencies of public school leaders in order to drive greater educational outcomes. The program is led by faculty Co-Chairs John J-H Kim and Andrés Alonso. John J-H Kim is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School where he teaches the Social Innovation Lab, and created and teaches the second-year MBA course Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovations in Education. He also founded and leads District Management Group, a firm that partners with school districts to help them implement educational and management best practices. Andrés Alonso is Visiting Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he contributes to leadership programs such as the Doctorate in Educational Leadership and the Certificate for Advanced Education Leadership (CAEL). Dr. Alonso is a former CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools and deputy chancellor at New York City DOE. [...]

Five weeks ago on May 24, we graduated from Harvard Business School with the Class of 2018. We moved out of our apartments and headed to Jackson, Mississippi for a weeklong training with Freedom Summer Collegiate. After training we drove to Meridian, Mississippi to teach a month-long summer class on Business and Entrepreneurship to high school students at the Meridian Freedom Project. [...]

The goal of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty in Harlem. It offers a tightly woven pipeline of wraparound, cradle-through-college services to children, families, and the community, all within a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Currently, HCZ has 861 students in college, a 97% college acceptance rate, and 20+ programs that serve over 13,000 students and over 14,000 adults in Harlem. My role is as an advisor to the COO (who is an HBS/HKS grad). Under his guidance, my projects have included working on a strategy to support coordinated enrichment efforts across seventeen afterschool sites, piloting a STEM initiative for elementary and middle school classrooms, and providing strategic recommendations to strengthen our academic case management model, which has supported thousands of students on the path to college and career readiness. [...]

Mentoring is one of oldest ways that people have found to connect with each other and be changed in the process. Here are two strangers – not bound by family and in fact often intentionally matched due to their differences in history and circumstance – who nevertheless connect and, more than that, are transformed by the experience. Especially in a world that seems so divided by difference, it feels remarkable that such connections can occur at all. But they do – over and over again. [...]

When I was 12-years old, my parents took me to visit the rural village in Gujarat India where our family originally came from. The children we met there were filled with spirit, and yet were running around barefoot, poorly nourished, and out of school. It felt unfair to me that I had more opportunities than them just because I grew up in Canada. I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but I knew it just wasn’t right. Since then, I have become acutely aware of the millions of children around the world who face limits because of where they were born or how much their families earn. Many days, this feels daunting. [...]