Welcome!

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) offers a doctoral program designed specifically for persons who wish to transform education as superintendents of our nation's urban school systems. The Urban Superintendents Program (USP) is a rigorous course of study designed for professionals who have worked innovatively and effectively in metropolitan school districts as teacher-leaders, school principals, or central office administrators.

USP students build upon their own experience as educators through coursework, an internship, and the research and writing of a dissertation. Since 1991, USP has produced 26 superintendents, 25 deputy superintendents or chief academic officers, 24 assistant or area superintendents, 21 directors (central office positions), 25 school principals, 10 special assistants or chief of staff, 10 educational consultants, 10 university faculty, and a deputy assistant secretary of education, U.S. Department of Education. The program's graduates advance our country's most important mission: systemically and systematically improving teaching and learning in our public schools in order to enable every child in America to achieve at the highest levels.

The Need

Urban school systems in the United States face the challenges of raising the achievement of all students to high levels, while at the same time closing the achievement gap. Lack of public trust, the shortage of new teachers, inadequate resources, and the lure of quick fixes to complex problems can combine to make these challenges extraordinarily difficult to address. Thus aspiring superintendents need to engage in the focused, sustained, and intellectually rigorous development of their own leadership commitment, knowledge, and skills.

Individuals who seek to expand and strengthen their leadership capacity through the Urban Superintendents Program are those who strive to become superb instructional leaders, politically astute coalition builders, expert managers of human and financial resources, and scholar-practitioners who add to the knowledge base through their own research. They want to develop greater clarity of vision, test the soundness of their educational values and beliefs, and deepen their resolve to hold themselves and others accountable for bringing about results for each and every student. Additionally, they want to increase their knowledge of research and best practices, their ability to engender continuous improvements in the instructional leadership of teachers and principals, their skills to assess needs and progress based on data, and their expertise in focusing resources on the improvement of student achievement. The results can be extraordinarily rewarding: graduates of the program know they have exponentially increased their capacity to qualitatively improve the educational experiences and life outcomes of children and youth in our nation's cities.

About our header image:
"The Head, Heart, & Hands of Leadership" A Painting by Boston Public School Students at Artists for Humanity