HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Hydra Mendoza (left) and Paul Cheng, both from the San Francisco public school system, are lively participants in the week-long executive education session of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), which is co-sponsored by Harvard's Business and Education Schools. (Staff photos Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

That's the impetus behind the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint venture of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and the Harvard Business School (HBS) launched in October 2003. A pioneering collaboration, PELP is a three-year executive education program that unites the faculty resources of both schools to create new knowledge addressing the specific challenges faced by nine participating urban school districts from across the country. In all, more than a million students stand to benefit from the Harvard initiative, which hosted leadership teams from those nine districts for a week of executive education at HBS in July.

"Like other complex problems ... it seems to me that a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary approach is going to be necessary if we're going to make progress in the field [of urban education]," says PELP core faculty member James Honan, HGSE senior lecturer. He and PELP senior researcher Stacey Childress are optimistic that PELP is succeeding where other efforts to impose management savvy on educational enterprises have failed.

"The ideal is that rather than faculty bringing to the table work they've

Superintendent of San Francisco public schools Arlene Ackerman (right) shares her wisdom with other PELP participants. In the background is Myong Leigh, also of the San Francisco public school system. (Staff photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

already done and seeing how it might link together, [we're] actually using both points of view from education management and general management and creating new content, new knowledge through both of those lenses," says Childress, director of HBS's Initiative on Social Enterprise.

Since October, the Harvard team has met several times with leadership teams from the nine districts (Anne Arundel County, Md.; Boston; Charleston, S.C.; Chicago; Harrisburg, Pa.; Minneapolis; Montgomery County, Md.; San Diego; and San Francisco) to learn about the challenges they face in providing the best possible education to all their students.

Boston Public Schools superintendent Thomas Payzant, Ed.D. '68, believes PELP's effort to bring the expertise of both business and education to bear on such a thorny, complex issue is on the mark.

"People become infatuated with the notion of noneducators taking on leadership positions in urban school districts, on the assumption that they're going to be able to do things that educators cannot do. I think that's not the right way to frame the question," he says. Drawing on the strengths of education insiders and outsiders produces more powerful results, he says.

More alike than different

Despite healthy skepticism about business Band-Aids for educational ills, Payzant and 71 other district leaders appeared to be, well, infatuated with leadership and organizational change guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at HBS, as she spoke toward the end of their weeklong stay at Harvard.

Giving a sneak preview of her forthcoming book, Kanter engaged the PELP participants with a lively accounting of what she calls winning and losing streaks. She drew from a broad range of examples - college and professional sports teams, schools, hospitals, a bank in Istanbul, Continental Airlines, and Gillette - to demonstrate the confidence of winners and how losers could harness it to turn their fortunes around.

Lectures by Kanter and others were the icing on a cake that layered case studies, work sessions among individual district teams, and networking opportunities to create a rich and productive week.

At the core of the curriculum were case studies created by faculty research teams from HGSE and HBS based directly on the districts' needs. Honan says those needs turned out to be more similar than different. "The perennial challenges facing urban school districts are around strategy, people, financial resources, and accountability measures," he says.

Childress notes that a "disguised composite" case, which fashioned a hypothetical school district from an aggregate of data from all nine districts, rang true to districts around the country. In that case, created by Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership Richard Elmore and HBS's Allen Grossman, professor of management practice, a fictional superintendent grapples with a familiar snarl of challenges. A deputy superintendent resigns due to stress, the student body has grown rapidly and now speaks 60 languages other than English, student achievement gaps widen by race and ethnicity, teacher recruitment and performance evaluation are weak, and budget constraints hamstring proven professional development efforts.

"When we test-drove the case in January ... everybody thought it was them," says Childress.

"A breakthrough week"

Several superintendents and top administrators admit that they came to Harvard for PELP with reservations. After all, a week out of the office for a school district's leaders takes its toll on the endless workload back home.

Yet many participants described PELP as far exceeding its promised outcomes.

San Diego Unified School District superintendent Alan Bersin '68 described it as "a breakthrough week," adding, "I'm not known for exaggerating."

Jerry Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County (Md.) schools, says PELP is unique among the many Harvard courses he's taken during his nearly three decades as a superintendent.

"The way they're approaching it is creating the magic: The structure, the sequencing, the drill-down, the dialogue, the cross-pollination that creates the fertile ground for the seeds to grow both here and I know back home," says Weast. "Teaching and learning is rocket science. We're learning how to treat it like that, which is bound to make our individuals more productive. This program's been like rocket fuel."

Moving forward through the next two years of PELP, which is funded by a gift from the HBS Class of 1963, the Harvard researchers will continue to tackle districts' challenges as they emerge and shift - and will continue to evaluate PELP's own effectiveness.

"One of the more traditional ways of thinking about success, at least with the districts, is measurable improvements in student achievement," says Honan. But imitation, too, would signal success: PELP's organizers hope that other schools of education and business model collaborations on the PELP model, and that PELP's case studies are broadly disseminated.

San Diego's Bersin, who was recently elected to the University's Board of Overseers, is pleased to play his part in leveraging Harvard's ability to create new knowledge that addresses real-world dilemmas. "This is an important example and illustration of a role that Harvard has played in the past and needs to continue to do: to get out there on the frontiers of making knowledge," he says. "What's impressive about this is that there's an acknowledgement that it can only be done in constant connection with feedback from practitioners."

beth_potier@harvard.edu