Author Abstract
How often has it been said that public education in the United States should be run more like a business? This exhortation urges American public schools to apply the same management, leadership and organizational approaches to public education that have been used to create the iconic state of global business. The idea is simple and seductive. The problem is that while public school districts have a myriad of managerial, leadership and organizational concerns, they are not businesses. In reality, their differences are greater than their similarities. Even so, our research in fifteen large urban public school districts reveals a hopeful phenomenon - one quite familiar to business. Districts that unrelentingly focus on their core business of student performance, create and implement coherent strategies around this core, and array all the elements of the district to drive and support improved classroom instruction, out-perform their peer districts with comparable constraints.
Paper Information
- Full Working Paper Text
- Working Paper Publication Date: September 2005
- HBS Working Paper Number: 06-004
- Faculty Unit(s): Entrepreneurial Management; General Management