Ushma Shah

USP Cohort 11, Second-Year Doctoral Candidate, Intern to Superintendent Arlene Ackerman of the San Francisco Public Schools

The Urban Superintendents Program has challenged me and my colleagues in the 11th cohort to do a 360 investigation of urban public school systems and what it means to lead them. During our first year in the program, we experienced course work that spans from the interpersonal skills of effective communication to law, finance, microeconomics, organizational theory, politics, and the quantitative tools of statistical research. We attended seminars with superintendents, had meetings with youth groups, and visited school systems with new eyes to study how ideas in the research literature and in the educational policy arena play out in the three dimensions of a district.

One of the central strengths of the program is ProSem, the year-long Professional Seminar in which the cohort explores various facets of the superintendency. In ProSem, our cohort synthesized learning from all courses and worked collectively to develop new models for instructional improvement and student success. Throughout the course, we drafted and delivered vision speeches that articulated the core commitments with which we will lead a district.

In some cases, the experiences in the Urban Superintendents Program have rocked the assumptions that we came with as teachers and instructional leaders from our home school systems, and in others, the experiences confir med and enhanced insights that we had from our work in these roles. In all cases, however, our attention has been and is continually focused on the question: What are the most powerful points of leverage to bring good teaching and learning to scale in urban school systems?