Leaders Go to School on Business Practices

Lots of districts like to think they have close-knit leadership teams. But few school leaders can say they've ironed their clothes together, which became a morning ritual for a group from San Francisco that spent a week at the Harvard Business School in Boston. Joined by similar teams from seven other large districts, they camped out in dorm-like quarters while engaging in the kind of deep thinking about organizational change that, while common among captains of industry, is rare for most school administrators. The workshop was part of the Public Education Leadership Project, a 2-year-old initiative meant to inject a dose of corporate sense into the way school systems are run. During the intense week, participants discussed case studies, attended lectures, and drafted action plans--some of which already have changed districts' practices. A joint effort of Harvard University's business school and its graduate school of education, the project is part executive training, part research and development. The project has the goal, over three years, of forging a new understanding about redesigning districts to achieve large-scale improvement in student learning. Organizers say districts shouldn't act like businesses so much as think like them. The big idea at the center of the project is "congruence," the alignment of all of a system's parts to drive its mission. Translated to education, that means human resources, facilities, and even transportation are managed to increase the quality of learning.