GSE Theses and Dissertations

A series of reform efforts over the past two decades have found the Boston Public Schools (BPS) making progress, despite the districts’ struggles over time to improve its lowest performing schools. Due to a total restructuring of the central office and a strategy focused on increasing student outcomes in a set of highly impacted schools across the city, BPS is keenly poised to address persistent achievement gaps and provide the Boston community with high quality schools in every neighborhood. My project was to lead the planning and facilitate the initial stages of the implementation of an effort to turn around 21 schools whose performance was below the city’s average on Massachusetts state assessments for two consecutive years. The strategy called for a focus on the individual schools and a new model of collaboration between the district central office and the schools. Cross-functional teams composed of district administrators, school leaders, teachers, and support staff worked jointly to customize interventions for the schools. The project succeeded in that it provided an opportunity to test a new central office structure designed to support principals to lead quality instruction in their schools. It also succeeded because central office administrators collaborated with school communities in unprecedented ways, used data publicly to target interventions toward the students with the greatest needs, allocated coaching support toward the schools, used budget flexibility to enhance school-based strategies, and rolled out a new evaluation system and staffing supports for this set of schools--all while maintaining requisite services for all schools. In addition to these successes, we encountered several key challenges including lack of initial funding, difficulties customizing professional development to the schools, creating a learning community among the school leaders, and sustaining a focus on this initiative while other initiatives vied for the same resources. Competing initiatives unveiled larger political challenges and created shifts in organizational priorities. We achieved success by focusing all of our attention on delivering services to the schools during the planning stages. At times, we failed to communicate well with school leaders and grappled to maintain consistent focus on supporting principals to lead instruction in their schools throughout the implementation. Boston Public Schools can be successful in transforming schools to improve quality (1) by continuing to restructure the central office to create the conditions for schools to be successful, (2) by creating direct lines of accountability for each central office employee to student learning in classrooms across the district, and (3) by beginning to address some significant inequities built into the system. Regardless of what new initiative arises, central offices must construct and organize systems that focus on partnerships with school leaders to ensure quality teaching and learning in every school, resulting in exceptional learning outcomes for every student. Hopefully, the content herein can be very helpful to BPS and others seeking to engage in similar manners of reform.

We are far from delivering on the educational promise that the young people in this country deserve. While there are standout students, exemplar educators, and model schools, we are nowhere near being able to provide a quality education, reliably across contexts. In order to do that, we have to learn how to get better across the sector at an accelerated pace. The Carnegie Foundation is dedicated to just that. Through the application of improvement science in networked improvement communities (NICs), the Foundation brings together practitioners, scholars, policy makers, systems leaders, and designers to solve important problems in the education sector. During my residency, I led Carnegie’s efforts to increase coherence between the methods it advocates and its internal practices. I engaged in a three-phased approach where I: (1) learned my way into the organization, (2) designed and developed routines to help Carnegie reach its aspirations, and (3) provided guidance for how to build a collective learning system. The idea of a collective learning system was derived from the insights gained in the first two phases. It continues to be developed beyond the span of this capstone so that it can be used in Carnegie’s NICs. Lessons about how to enter an organization, affect cultural change, and build collective learning systems are presented in this capstone.

The paper explores two strategic projects that attempt to build leadership capacity through the vehicles of coaching and communities of practice in a large urban school district. The paper explores the conditions that enable or hinder change initiatives to move from idea to design to implementation and on-going learning for the organization. The experience at LAUSD helped to highlight the need for a balanced approach to organizational change that emphasizes developing the human resources within the system as a key lever in a successful change initiative. In order to create a learning organization with an emphasis on collaboration and reflective practices, the organization must value these practices and create the culture to support them.

The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has engaged in ambitious urban school reform since Michelle Rhee began exercising leadership as the district’s chancellor six years ago. Rhee launched efforts to terminate ineffective teachers, build a comprehensive performance management system, and hire principals who promised to deliver radically improved student outcomes. Although Rhee’s tenure was short-lived, her successor has engaged in equally transformative reform efforts, while exercising a more collaborative leadership style. With attention having been focused on building teachers’ instructional capacity, a shift is taking place in DCPS--one that increasingly recognizes the role of school leader as a key lever to whole school improvement. Amidst the slew of principals released by Rhee, DCPS looked externally to select principals with proven track records to take over its failing schools. However, in the last two years a central office Principal Effectiveness (PE) team was created to grow principals from within. This small team was charged to build an internal leadership development program to prepare DCPS employees for the principalship. As a former high school principal and Harvard Graduate School of Education student agreeing to complete her residency with DCPS, I was tasked to bring this vision to life. While the work of stakeholder engagement, recruitment and selection, program and lesson design, and launch and implementation, was plentiful, time-consuming, and often stressful--it was mostly technical in nature. What became increasingly clear is that the more difficult, adaptive work of shifting organizational culture was direly needed. In this capstone, I assert that DCPS’s organizational culture is not yet organized to facilitate adult learning and capacity building. While our small team successfully reached a critical milestone in launching DCPS’s aspiring principals program (called the Mary Jane Patterson Fellowship), we recognized a critical need to work more strategically and methodically to address a looming adaptive challenge: If we help the system’s aspiring principals evolve into highly effective school leaders who will transform teaching and learning in DCPS schools, we must also help the system evolve in its capacity to believe in and concretely support its leaders as adult learners. As a way of exploring this adaptive challenge, I will describe a gap between the organization’s espoused belief system and the behaviors of its senior leaders, and how this gap has critical implications for the learner orientation of the district as a system. Across the sector, there are individuals and small programs that are positioned as key levers to shift the organizational culture of their surrounding systems. In the case of DCPS, the Patterson Fellowship is an ideal lever for system change. What this requires is a creative strategy to build a synergistic relationship between key players of the Patterson Fellowship team and district leaders who can envision new possibilities for organizational learning. Simply put, DCPS must increase its orientation toward adult learning and development in order to engage in whole system transformation. With student learning at stake, the learning of adults is of critical importance. Becoming a learning organization for key adults in the system is DCPS’s greatest current challenge.

Building a social movement that produces teaching and leadership talent for school systems and leaders who can take on the systemic dimensions of the problem of educational inequity is a complex challenge. To help address this challenge successfully, entrepreneurial educational leaders must develop their capacity for leadership and management, improve their adaptive leadership skills and be able to communicate a narrative that can help them build broad coalitions of support. In this paper, I introduce a problem many entrepreneurial educational leaders in the Teach For All network face in acquiring the public and private sector support needed to advance their organization’s mission. I focus on how Teach For All has created a global organization to help solve this problem. Teach For All is an international non-profit working to help entrepreneurs around the world build social movements in their countries to end educational inequity. To inform my practice, I apply a knowledge base developed by John Kotter, Ron Heifetz, Dean Williams and Marshall Ganz to work I am doing as I complete my residency at Teach For All. For my strategic project, I was tasked with helping a group of social entrepreneurs tackle challenges in building the public and private sector support needed to advance the mission of their organizations. In this paper, I reflect on the question of how we help these entrepreneurs lead effective educational organizations in complex, diverse and changing environments. I focus on the interventions I implemented with the leadership teams of Teach For Japan and Teach For Brazil specifically, and share progress that these organizational leaders were able to make. In my analysis, I find I was required to practice leadership, go beyond the constraints of authority and partner with other functional team leaders within Teach For All to develop the capacity of the entrepreneurs we serve so that they can become more effective in leadership and management. I also find that being able to do good diagnosis proves to be difficult for a resident who is assigned to a high-impact initiative within the organization. Finally, my findings also reveal that Teach For All seems more organized to provide technical support to its partners and must work to develop its ability to provide support for the more complicated and adaptive challenges that its partners around the world face. Understanding how entrepreneurial leaders are able to meet build public and private sector support in a global context is of value to social entrepreneurs in the Teach For All network and education leaders around the world who must work across boundaries of difference to advance the mission of their organizations. The findings from this paper also have implications for my future work as an educational leader, the leadership development and management work of Teach For All, and the education sector in the United States and around the world.

For my residency, I led a strategic project at The School District of Philadelphia to help the District transition to a weighted student funding approach to school budgets. The goals of the transition in budgeting philosophy were to bring greater equity, transparency, and strategic alignment to the school budgeting process. In this capstone, I explore the results of the District’s proposed change in funding scheme on resource allocation to schools of various types, and analyze the extent to which weighted student funding would be likely to help the District realize the goals it set forth. The lessons learned from the execution of the strategic project illuminate important considerations for The School District of Philadelphia, as well as for the education sector more broadly.

Khan Academy’s projects are designed to inspire and empower teachers and students to discover, create, and advance their learning. This paper begins by reviewing my entry project, co-leading the Discovery Lab, which is a hands-on learning summer program. Then it transitions to online project-based video content I created. I next explore effective project-based learning and Design Based Research (DBR) to set the stage for Spider and Spout, our hands-on robotics project pilot studies. Spout provided promising results, which were used for the implementation of Spider, a more advanced fully programmable robot that can be built using only online instruction. These projects suggest that DBR could be used to effectively implement our project-based curriculum. Our Spider pilot project also suggests that it is possible to train students to build projects assisted only by online videos. However, it remains unclear if the students will be able to move beyond the procedural knowledge acquired by following the step-by-step videos to effective project-based learning (more advanced critical thinking and creative problem solving). This report then reveals that more research is needed to draw conclusions about how effective our projects will be at scaling across the education sector or at disrupting or changing existing culture of the classroom. Next, I identify the Discovery Lab 2013 as a means for rapidly gaining research data to improve our projects prior to scaling. Finally, I explore the key components of my learning as a leader.

Action/Research Question: Serving as a School Design Fellow with the Expanded Success Initiative School Design Fellowship within the New York City Department of Education, I have been working with a team of educators to develop and launch a breakthrough high school model that will dramatically increase college and career readiness for students of color in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. We will launch three schools in Brooklyn and Queens this fall. This capstone will focus on a central question: How might we transform the interaction between schools and communities in order to positively influence the learning environments for children? A related subsidiary question is: How might schools create enabling conditions for students while we transform the learning model in schools? For purposes of this capstone, learning environments are defined broadly as community-based partnerships, advocacy and activism connected to improvement of neighborhood resources, family engagement strategies, support services and operations within the school and beyond, and finally the built environment of the school itself. The implication here is that all of these factors impact learning in profound ways. Research for Action: I start with a foundational base that briefly establishes what has already been well-established: the contextual reality of students’ lives impacts their learning deeply. I note the limitations of current educational policy to address these contextual concerns while spending a little time articulating exactly how these contextual challenges (poverty, unemployment, lacking healthcare, etc.) impact student learning and child development. I then strive to create a “bridge” between conventional education policy—which tends not to address such concerns—and promising practices currently underway in the field. I then delve into the research around these promising practices that strive to improve learning environments for students. Strategic Project: My strategic project involved working with the team to engage in prospective thought and initial action to begin improving student learning environments as part of our design work. Such attention to learning environments was not implicit in the initial design of the fellowship, which focused heavily on changing instructional and staffing practices. Implications: The implications of this work emphasize both the promise of what schools can do to improve surrounding learning environments as enabling conditions as well as the limitations of this work at the school site level. An overarching finding is the degree to which the work of creating strong enabling conditions for learning must be integrated across sectors even if thought leadership and work initiation begins in schools based on students’ needs.

Despite the tremendous value new ventures contribute, research shows that failure rates of new ventures are 10 times greater than the failure rates for larger, established organizations (Beaver, 2003). In public education, entrepreneurial ventures are increasingly recognized as a vital tool in the struggle to improve academic outcomes for students across the United States. Ensuring early stage venture success is vital to their continued impact; to do this, venture philanthropy couples monetary investments with intensive supports, also known as management assistance. This Capstone is an account of a venture philanthropic firm’s exploration of management assistance and the relationship to the internal organizational components that influence them. An examination of management assistance from both the point of view of the entrepreneur, an outside-in perspective, and the staff, an inside-out perspective, reveals insights into the complex systems of the organization and the necessary components to develop and sustain effective management assistance practices. Entrepreneurism in public education is increasingly recognized as a vital tool in the struggle to improve academic outcomes for students across the United States; yet, the investment in and nurturing of new, innovative ideas is a complex activity. One way innovative ideas have gained a foothold in public education is through the founding and growth of entrepreneurial ventures; however, the success of new ventures is highly variable. Despite the tremendous value new ventures contribute, the research shows that failure rates of new ventures are 10 times greater than the failure rates for larger, established organizations (Beaver, 2003). It is with this in mind that this Capstone explores what one organization learned about the supports contributing to venture success. I explore the work of a venture philanthropic firm dedicated to investing in early stage ventures and committed to coupling their investments with strategic support. I seek to understand what supports and structures are necessary to promote venture growth and success. NewSchools Venture Fund (NewSchools) was created in 1998, a decade during which venture capital was seen as a more promising alternative to generating innovation than what were formally centralized R&D processes (Gompers & Lerner, 2001). Social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers founded NewSchools with a vision to apply the venture capital model to public education. Having “witnessed the power visionary entrepreneurs held to create dramatic change in other sectors, such as technology,” they believed that education entrepreneurs could have a similar impact (“Investment History,” n.d., para. 1). NewSchools’ founders believed that education entrepreneurs could bring about much-needed change in public education if they had access to “both early-stage capital and strategic, hands-on support to start and grow their organizations” (“Investment History,” n.d., para. 1). NewSchools was one of the first social venture funds to transform public education by supporting education entrepreneurs. “(The founder) Kim Smith set the tone for a whole new movement of social entrepreneurs and the effective and productive use of philanthropy for education reform” (Sandler, 2010, p. 129). Since inception, over $145M has been invested in more than 130 ventures contributing significantly to an entrepreneurial landscape that was once minimal when NewSchools first launched, but has now burgeoned to include ventures across the country. NewSchools plays two critical roles in contributing to entrepreneurial activity in the K12 public school system. First, NewSchools is one of a handful of organizations nationwide that provides financial capital to early stage education entrepreneurs. Second, and perhaps most importantly, NewSchools acts as a hub of entrepreneurial activity--convening, guiding, and building connections from within its portfolio to public schools and public school systems across the country. It is the second part of NewSchools’ role that requires regular attention and review to ensure that NewSchools continues to provide the highest value to its entrepreneurs. NewSchools asked me to evaluate the efficacy of its non-monetary investments and embark on a review of its “management assistance,” the mechanism by which NewSchools supports its investments after an investment has been made. The following Review of Knowledge for Action presented a starting place for me.

Collaboration is seen as an essential skill that students will need to succeed in a twenty-first–century economy. American public school students are currently being asked to learn and demonstrate collaboration skills that the adults responsible for their education either do not have, have not been asked to use or do not practice well themselves. System leaders therefore have a daunting responsibility. They must model and foster a spirit of community, interdependence, and collective action around the work of instructional improvement. Senior leaders must exercise the kind of leadership that attends to the development of others, and organizes people in the system around a shared vision, purpose, and urgency, a shared commitment and shared measurable actions. To lead and support teamwork and collaboration effectively at all levels of their school systems, senior leadership teams must find the courage, create the conditions and get the support necessary to attend to their own development and transformation. This capstone examines how senior leaders in one large, diverse school system (Montgomery County, MD) took on this challenge: they invested in an exploration and improvement of their own abilities to work in teams as a lever for cultural change, better organizational performance, and a way to move an already high-performing district from good to great. My review of knowledge for action drew from research on teamwork, collaboration, and senior leadership teams, as well as literature on change leadership, coaching, and constructive-developmental and adult learning perspectives. This research helped me to develop a conceptual framework for the strategic actions that senior leaders in school systems must take to improve teamwork and collaboration. Between July 2013 and April 2014, a significant part of my role as a doctoral resident in Montgomery County Public Schools was to (1) surface conditions and factors that hinder and facilitate teamwork at the senior leadership level, (2) develop ways for senior leaders to gain a holistic understanding of the many factors that influence how they work together, and (3) engage senior leaders in the design and monitoring of their own improvement work. Principles of ethnography and design-based research illuminated my actions and those of the senior leaders. Improvements in team effectiveness and performance in this context were measured through progress in team functioning and individual senior leadership team members’ increased satisfaction with and reflection on their own learning and growth. Many challenges remain. Findings revealed factors that influence teamwork including racial and gender dynamics, thoughts about the leader, lack of trust, pride and commitment. Culminating snapshot profiles of senior leadership team members are developed to enhance the strengthening of their relationships and functioning as they continue their work. To further analyze progress, strengths, and challenges I used an organizing framework (Ganz, 2012) that integrates principles of grassroots practices, organizational effectiveness, and team development. In hopes of adding to the body of knowledge specific to teamwork and collaboration on senior leadership teams in public school systems, the capstone concludes with reflections and implications for the author, the senior leaders that constituted the unit of analysis, the organization, and the public education sector.