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.

The state of public education in the United States is a perennial hot-button topic, with rhetoric often outpacing any real sense of progress. The Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a 2003 joint initiative of HBS and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, seeks to remedy that situation by working with leadership teams from nine urban school districts over the course of three annual sessions to coordinate research and create coherent, scalable systems for education reform.

Two cases written for PELP and taught by HBS professor David Thomas focus on a piece of the puzzle. "The Campaign for Human Capital at the School District of Philadelphia" examines one district’s innovative approach to recruiting and retaining qualified teachers; "Reinventing Human Resources at the School District of Philadelphia" continues the story by looking at the challenge of transforming a human resources department from a paper-pushing backwater to an entity that is strategically incorporated into the district’s overall mission.

"One observation that we made early in PELP is that school systems have essentially not changed their personnel practices around hiring and retention since the end of World War II," says Thomas. It was assumed then that applicants for a teaching position didn’t want to do anything else, or that they didn’t have many other options, conditions that clearly don’t hold in today’s world, where vacancy rates in urban districts can reach as high as 50 percent at the start of the school year.

by Julia Hanna

Full Story: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5321&t=organizations&iss=y