NEWS INFORMATION FROM

THE OFFICE OF MAYOR STEPHEN R. REED
City of Harrisburg
King City Government Center
Harrisburg, PA 17101-1678
Telephone: 717.255.3040

FOR IMMEDIATE USE
22 October 2003

HARVARD’S EDUCATION AND BUSINESS SCHOOLS ENGAGE HARRISBURG SCHOOLS IN PARTNERSHIP TO BOOST STUDENT SUCCESS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—October 21, 2003—The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Harvard Business School (HBS), and nine urban school districts today announced the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint venture, collaboratively designed to dramatically improve the educational outcomes of these school systems. Harrisburg Schools join eight other districts; representing more than a million students, including many of the urban hubs across the nation such as Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

“The Harrisburg School District is very pleased and excited to have been selected by Harvard to participate in this program,” says Gerald Kohn, Superintendent, Harrisburg School District. “We look forward to working with Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as the other eight school districts from across the nation. We believe there is a great deal to learn about success in urban education. We anticipate Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Project will help all of us increase student achievement.”

Harrisburg Mayor, Stephen R. Reed, who has oversight of the Harrisburg Schools as a result of a change in state law two years ago, says: “Harvard examined many urban districts across the nation to identify the ones that are making progress in creating system wide reform and improvement. We are honored to have been named one of the select nine. What is happening here will be shared with others across the country as their successes will be shared with us. Together, it is our goal to identify the best national model for urban school success in America’s 21st Century.”

The PELP faculty team invited, through a competitive process, urban school districts to partner in the design and delivery of an innovative executive education program tailored specifically to meet the actual challenges that educational leaders are facing.

“Although there are many excellent individual schools in the United States, there are very few K–12 urban school systems that have achieved a uniform high level of excellence that allows students to be educated to their optimum potential,” says Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Warren Professor of the History of American Education and dean of HGSE. “The ability to scale up success remains one of the most intractable problems in education and a barrier to real educational progress.”

Research, and the experience of other institutions, has shown that addressing this problem is not just a matter of applying lessons from the management of other sectors. It is necessary to understand the many forces that drive the educational enterprise—political, pedagogical, governmental, technological, logistical, and legal—then to adapt and integrate knowledge from the private, nonprofit, and education sectors to devise new insights and approaches within that demanding context.

“Leading and managing in the multi-faceted and dynamic environment of an urban school system is an incredible challenge that is complicated further by the heavy day-to-day demands of the job,” says Kim Clark, dean of HBS. “We believe that bringing the expertise of Harvard’s Education and Business schools together with the practical experience of the participating school districts will lead to new ideas and approaches that can have a significant impact on education.”

Participating districts include: Anne Arundel County (MD), Boston (MA), Charleston (SC), Chicago (IL), Harrisburg (PA), Minneapolis (MN), Montgomery County (MD), San Diego (CA), and San Francisco (CA).

“Each of the districts had an improvement strategy and long-term vision to enhance student achievement,” says Stacey Childress, the senior researcher managing the project for HBS and HGSE. “We’ll be working with the individual districts to design, manage and lead complex systems geared toward high performance.”

Core faculty members include Richard Elmore, James Honan, Robert Peterkin, and Robert Schwartz from HGSE, and James Austin, Nancy Beaulieu, Allen Grossman, Stig Leschly, and David Thomas from HBS.

The three-year project will have two principal components: a weeklong executive education program offered each summer beginning in 2004 for a five- to seven-person leadership team from each district, during which the team would learn from the experiences of other districts while developing strategic improvement goals for the coming year; and periodic on-site facilitation during the year from participating faculty and staff.

At the same time, participating faculty will conduct research aimed at measuring the effectiveness of the program, identifying the key underlying forces that are shaping educational leadership in urban school systems, and developing a set of powerful ideas to enable district leadership teams to create high performing systems.

Principal funding for the Public Education Leadership Project comes from the Harvard Business School Class of 1963 and will subsidize the development and delivery of the program over the first three years (FY ’04–’06).

For more information, please contact David Lampe at 617.495.6336, Christine Sanni at 617.496.5873, or Greer Bautz at 617.496.1884.

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