How to Manage Urban School Districts

One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in urban public schools in the United States. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish small schools to ensure that students receive sufficient attention--the list goes on. Although these approaches have created positive changes in individual schools, they have failed to produce a single high-performing urban school system. In this article, the authors, who are members of Harvard University's Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), explain why. One reason, they say, is that educators, researchers, and policy makers see the district office, which oversees all the schools in a district, as part of the problem rather than a crucial part of the solution--and this is a mistake. The district office plays an important role in developing strategies, identifying and spreading best practices, developing leadership capabilities at all levels, building information systems to monitor student improvement, and holding people accountable for results. The authors propose a holistic framework that district leaders can use to develop an improvement strategy and build coherent organizations to implement it. The framework is based on three beliefs. First, school systems need their own management models; they cannot simply import them from the business world. Second, "the customer" is the student; therefore, urban districts need to focus on improving teaching and learning in every classroom at every school. Third, district leaders must design their organizations so that all the components--culture, systems and structures, resources, and mechanisms for managing stakeholders and the external environment--reinforce one another and support the implementation of the strategy across schools.

• Infrastructure and urban development
• Business education
• Strategy execution
• Public education
• Strategy formulation