Public Education Goes to School at Harvard’s School of Business and Education with the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP)

Harvard’s schools of Business and Education are bringing management skills to nine school districts across the country—and positive results are starting to show.

Can the art and science of business management help public schools improve student performance? In the fall of 2001, faculty and staff from the Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) began to discuss how they might work together on the leadership and management challenges facing the education sector.

The result was the now three-year-old Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), which works with nine urban public school districts representing over one million students. "Rather than creating an institutional partnership, we formed an intellectual one, and the deans of both schools and the president of the university have enthusiastically supported us all along," says PELP co-founder and HBS lecturer Stacey Childress.

The nine participating school districts together employ nearly 100,000 people and manage $11 billion in annual expenditures. They include some of the country’s largest cities, including Boston, Chicago, Memphis, and San Francisco. Based on a rigorous selection process, the Harvard team invited the districts because each had a performance-improvement strategy and a long-term commitment to enhancing student achievement. They also demonstrated a base of support in their cities for system-wide change.

by Mallory Stark

Full Story: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5148&t=nonprofit