Leadership Development in Entrepreneurial Education for the Advancement of Public & Private Sector Support

Abstract

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.