In the fall of 2012, Dr. Andres Alonso had much to celebrate about in his five-year tenure as CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, including the approval and implementation of an innovative teachers' contract with a jointly-governed four-tier career pathway that tied teacher pay and promotion to performance and peer review. Nonetheless, Alonso was concerned about the future of the contract and the reforms it introduced. It took two votes before the teachers ratified the contract in November 2010. Since then, implementation had been laborious, complicated, and uncertain. many questions would have to be answered in the coming months. Was the district making the transition to a contract that rewarded "engagement" in a career pathway rather than passive reliance on steps and lanes? Were the processes for earning Achievement Units and progressing through the pathways rigorous enough so that the contract wouldn't default to the past practice where everyone moves up and earns more money? Were the joint governance structures established to direct and manage the career pathways, pay system, and peer-review process working effectively? How did the new system support the district's underlying theory of change?
This is a PELP case study. The case services as a follow-up to Meeting New Challenges at the Aldine Independent School District (A) case. Superintendent Nadine Kujawa retired in May 2007 and Wanda Bamberg, the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, was chosen by the school board to succeed Kujawa. In the midst of the economic crisis, Bamberg retained Aldine's vision and basic strategy. The system remained organized in five vertical feeder systems and continued to promote district veterans principal and area superintendent positions. Students performed well on the state assessment, but new challenges emerged. A more rigorous state test, the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR), was about to be implemented and the district grappled with flat-lining college readiness scores. Bamberg had a decision to make; she could keep the district doing what had worked so well in the past or strike out in an entirely new direction.
This is a PELP case study. In the space of three months, all Central Falls High School staff had been publicly fired, told to reapply for their jobs, and then rehired. At the heart of the controversy were low student achievement scores and graduation rates; only seven percent of 11th grade students were proficient in math, 55 percent in reading, and the four-year graduation rate was 52 percent. Coinciding with the state's intense effort to win a share of the $4.35 billion in the federal government's Race to the Top (RTTT) education reform competition, the events were often portrayed in the national media as a fight between responsible reformers and self-interested unions. But, a closer look revealed a more complex situation. The requirements of a 1997 state law, which authorized the state commissioner to intervene in low-performing schools, appeared to conflict with the state's collective bargaining law, which required districts to negotiate with their teachers' union about hours, salary, working conditions, and all other terms of professional employment. The current union contract would not expire until August 2011. In addition, there was confusion about what the process of selecting an intervention model should involve and who from among the potential stakeholders-taxpayers, district administrators, state officials, the teachers' union, teachers, parents, students and others-should participate. The mass firing also raised the issue of whether staff were actually being fired or simply laid off, which had important consequences for the district's future obligations to former employees.
A U.S.-based security software company considers its options to expand. Different labor-market and labor-law situations are analyzed for the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, and India.
In his role as Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Minneapolis Fed), Art Rolnick and his colleague, Rob Grunewald, had written "Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return." The thesis was fairly straightforward; early childhood development (ECD) had the highest returns so states and local governments should invest in it. But the idea of investing in ECD for economic development was new and had never been tested on a large scale, particularly in the way that Rolnick and Grunewald recommended in a later paper - using market forces to drive demand for high-quality ECD programs. The Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (MELF), formed in 2005, invested in two projects designed to test the economists' recommendations. The St. Paul Early Childhood Scholarship Program (SPECSP) provided up to $13,000 a year per child for parents in two St. Paul neighborhoods to select a high-quality ECD program of their choice. MELF had also invested in Five Hundred Under 5 (FHU5), a Minneapolis program formed to improve the capacity and quality of providers. Comparing SPECSP to FHU5 would offer insights on the potential impact of supply-side versus demand-side ECD initiatives. Rolnick reflected on the two MELF experiments. Which would be more effective? Would parents in St. Paul really drive up the quality of providers through the choices they made or was it better to work with providers directly to improve quality?
College Summit, a nonprofit organization "committed to the day when every student who can make it in college makes it to college," was faced with an important strategic decision. After growing rapidly at more than 30% a year for the last several years, Founder and CEO J.B. Schramm, Chief Strategy Officer Mora Segal, and the College Summit team must now decide whether or not to dramatically redefine their organization's theory of change. College Summit could continue to "get results and grow real fast" or make the bold choice to re-conceptualize its strategy to focus on system-level change. While there were numerous risks to pursuing the alternative strategy, for Schramm and Segal, the possibility of helping redefine the purpose of secondary education might be too significant to ignore.
Pat Pratt Cook joins Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) as the Chief Human Resource Officer after the Superintendent Dr. Bill Green convinces her that HR will take on a more strategic role in the District. Pratt Cook arrives to find an HR department dramatically affected by recent budget cuts and limited by a bureaucratic culture focused on the basic employment transactions. Furthermore, the MPS is in the middle of contentious teachers' contract negotiations,and Pratt Cook is expected to take a leading role. The MPS negotiating team secures a school-based hiring program, called "interview and select," and District administrators work with union leaders to implement the program. A new, collaborative union president is elected andPat Cook looks forward to better working relationships. However, with each success, Pratt Cook finds that new challenges emerge.
Jim Rogers, CEO of the energy company Cinergy, has led the company from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the premier energy companies through selecting a focused strategy, aligning the organization to support it, and mobilizing all the employees to implementation. The case also discusses the strategies used by Rogers to communicate the strategy, which included innovative image maps.