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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.