Schools & Education

27 Results

 

Teaching Leadership: What We Know

The field of leadership education has reached a critical stage. After several decades of experimentation, "The Handbook for Teaching Leadership," Scott A. Snook, Rakesh Khurana, and Nitin Nohria, is intended to be a foundational reference for educators facing this increasingly important challenge. Open for comment; 13 Comments posted.

When Researchers Cheat (Just a Little)

Although cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, less flagrant transgressions of research norms may be more prevalent and, in the long run, more damaging to the academic enterprise, reports Assistant Professor Leslie K. John. Open for comment; 13 Comments posted.

How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. Open for comment; 20 Comments posted.

Twenty-first Century Skill: Trading Carbon Credits

As cap and trade becomes an increasingly popular mechanism for governments to cut corporate pollution, students at Harvard Business School use a simulation to learn how it works. An interview with professor Peter Coles. Open for comment; 7 Comments posted.

Panel on Pedagogical Innovations in MBA Courses

Faculty Research Symposium 2010: Multiple pedagogical innovations are taking place at HBS that are fundamentally changing students' learning experiences. Read More

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

Srikant M. Datar and David A. Garvin

Why get an MBA degree? Transformations in business and society make this question increasingly urgent for executives, business school deans, students, faculty, and the public. In a new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, Harvard Business School's Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen suggest opportunities for innovation. Q&A with Datar and Garvin plus book excerpt. Read More

Investing in Improvement: Strategy and Resource Allocation in Public School Districts

Stacey Childress

The operating environments of public school districts are largely void of the market forces that reward a company's success with more capital and exert pressure on it to eventually abandon unproductive activities. Stacey Childress describes the strategic resource decisions in 3 of the 20 public school districts that she and colleagues have studied through the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard. The stories in San Francisco, New York City, and Maryland's Montgomery County occurred largely before the districts faced dramatic decreases in revenues, though they show the superintendents facing budget concerns near the end of the narratives. Even so, the situations share common principles that superintendents and their leadership teams can use to make differentiated resource decisions—reducing spending in some areas and increasing it in others with a clear rationale for why these decisions will produce results for students. Read More

HBS Past and Present

Eight enduring themes have characterized Harvard Business School from its earliest years, and remain as integral as ever to the way the School thinks and operates. Read More

Harvard and HBS: The Next 100 Years

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reflected on Harvard Business School's past 100 years and shared her vision of the future, while HBS Dean Jay Light discussed the School's history and highlighted key focus areas for the future. Read More

Business Summit: Business Education in the 21st Century

Business schools are innovating and experimenting to change the MBA experience, and to help business education regain its relevance and value. Along with a changing curricula, programs are attempting to make the learning experience more interactive, engaging, global, and experiential. Read More

Business Summit: The Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Transforming American Public Education

Amid formidable barriers, a set of passionate social entrepreneurs are disrupting the status quo in education with innovative and effective approaches that are producing measurable results. The challenge now is to build support so these solutions can be applied elsewhere. Read More

Harvard Business School Discusses Future of the MBA

The MBA industry is in turmoil. Many business schools are revisiting their offerings to see if they still have relevance in the 21st century. And HBS is using its centennial year to convene worldwide experts on business education and plot its directions for the next 100 years. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Secrets of the Academy: The Drivers of University Endowment Success

Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar, and Jialan Wang

University endowments are important and interesting institutions both in the investing community and society at large. They play a role in maintaining the academic excellence of many universities that rely heavily on income from their endowments. In contrast, poor finances can undermine a school's ability to provide academic services altogether. Endowments have also received much attention recently for their superior investment returns compared with other institutional investors. In this study, the authors document the trends in college and university endowment returns and investments in the United States between 1992 and 2005. Read More

How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson

HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, joins colleagues Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson to advocate for ways in which ideas around innovation can spur much-needed improvements in public education. A Q&A with the authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Read More

HBS Cases: Reforming New Orleans Schools After Katrina

Stacey M. Childress

The New Orleans public school system, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is now getting a boost from charter schools—today about half of the city's 80 schools are charter schools, says HBS lecturer and senior researcher Stacey M. Childress. She explains what New Orleans represents for entrepreneurial opportunities in U.S. public education. Read More

The Intellectual History of Harvard Business School

This colloquium held at HBS in April looked at key developments in the areas of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, accounting, and strategy, among others. HBS professor Richard S. Tedlow describes the highlights. Read More

Chris Christensen: Legend of the Classroom

Professor C. Roland ("Chris") Christensen was the maestro of Harvard Business School's case method of teaching. Over a career spanning half a century, Christensen made his colleagues better teachers, and his students better leaders. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Management Education’s Unanswered Questions

Rakesh Khurana

Managers want the status of professionals, but not all managers want the constraints that go along with professions. Why? For more than 100 years, business education at the top universities has been searching for its soul. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, author of a new book, says business school education is at a turning point. Read More

Are Elite Business Schools Fostering the Deprofessionalization of Management?

Summing Up. The founders of top business schools wanted to make management a profession similar to law, medicine, and theology. But the results look different, according to a new book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, by HBS professor Rakesh Khurana. Now Jim Heskett asks: How, and to what extent, are business schools themselves contributing to the situation? Forum now closed. Closed for comment; 70 Comments posted.

Strategy-Proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth

One of the goals of school matching systems is to limit the extent to which students and parents feel it necessary to "game the system" to be accepted at a favored school. Several years ago, the authors of this paper assisted the New York City Department of Education in redesigning the way it matched over 90,000 students entering public high schools each year. The situation in New York City is a hybrid: Some schools actively rank potential students, others have no preferences, and still others fall in between. This paper concentrates on the welfare considerations and incentives that arise in school choice due to the fact that many students are regarded by schools as equivalent. The research develops and expands on economic theory demanded by the design of school choice mechanisms. Read More

“UpTick” Brings Wall Street Pressure to Students

Money managers work in a stressful, competitive pressure cooker that's hard to appreciate from the safety of a business management classroom. That's why HBS professors Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford invented upTick—a market simulation program that has students sweating and strategizing as they recreate classic market scenarios. Read More

New at the Helm: A Talk with HBS Dean Light

Jay O. Light

As Harvard Business School's ninth Dean, Jay Light takes control at a critical point in time. Light discusses the opportunities brought by globalism, challenges in recruiting and developing faculty, and program innovation needed to meet the needs of 21st-century business leaders. Read More

Mixing Students and Scientists in the Classroom

In his course on commercializing science and technology, Lee Fleming combines students from business, engineering, law, science, and medicine. The result: Ideas for products from scale-eating bacteria to quantum dot cancer treatments. Read More

Meeting China’s Need for Management Education

On a recent trip to China, Steven C. Wheelwright noted an increasing interest in entrepreneurship, globalization, and competitiveness. Most of all, the Chinese have an increasing thirst for management education. Read More

Writing the Case for Public School Reform

Professor David Thomas discusses his case studies on how the School District of Philadelphia is recruiting and retaining teachers and improving its human resources department. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Promoting a Management Revolution in Public Education

Stacey M. Childress, Richard Elmore, and Allen S. Grossman

Public school districts are difficult to lead and manage, and the idea of applying business principles to school reform is popular. But is it practical? This paper describes the work of Harvard's Public Education Leadership Program as it helps school districts grapple with performance challenges, including student achievement that compares unfavorably with other countries, and a significant performance gap between white and minority students. Complicating the picture: The concept of managing for accountability is new in education. The authors studied the effects of improved management on public school student performance by comparing fifteen large urban school districts with similar peer districts. Read More

Building Bridges Between Education and Business

How can Latin American universities and businesses join forces to stimulate more case writing in the region? In small group discussions at the conference, senior business executives and academics sat down to sort out the barriers and enablers they see in the case-writing process—and presented a host of suggestions for enhanced communication and collaboration in the future. Read More