Questions with...
Monica Higgins and Tom Payzant, M.A.T.’63, C.A.S.’66, Ed.D.’68
Faculty for Hire
When a graduate school of education has a vacant faculty
position, how should they go about filling the slot? In order to
effectively prepare educators for the future, especially in a competitive
environment, Associate Professor Monica Higgins and
Professor Tom Payzant, M.A.T.’63, C.A.S.’66, Ed.D.’68, suggest
that schools should carefully evaluate the needs of educators.
Higgins, a former Harvard Business School professor, and
Payzant, former superintendent of Boston Public Schools, sat
down with Ed. this summer to talk about a more strategic
approach to hiring, the paper they recently cowrote on the topic,
and why entrepreneurial leadership is so important.
When it comes to faculty hiring at education schools, you advocate for figuring out what the outside world needs.
MH: In some ways, our paper, “Hiring for the Future,” is a push to stimulate debate. Rather than thinking about programs, chairs, and professorships that need to be filled, let’s also think strategically about what is it that we’d like to be able to say that our students can do when they leave here. What skills, what competencies, and what kinds of connections do we want our students to have? From there we can think about what kinds of faculty we’d like to have who can teach those certain skills, design effective courses, and do research that will contribute to our vision for how our students are going to have an impact on education. It’s really an outside — and more strategic — kind of view. That’s not to say that you won’t have programs that need to be filled, but the problem is, if you only think about existing programs and existing chairs, then you might get trapped by the past. This is a forward-thinking approach.
One of the reasons for this, you write in your paper, is because future graduates of education schools need to be more entrepreneurial and PR savvy. Can you explain?
TP: As a former school superintendent, I learned that effective communication is an essential leadership skill. Competition shapes the context in which many school districts and schools are functioning now, particularly in cities, but even in some suburbs. Opportunities for parents to choose which public schools their children attend are increasing and educators must learn how to market their schools by convincing parents that they will meet the needs of their children and help them achieve at high levels. Entrepreneurial leaders don’t assume that all you have to do is open the doors and students will come.
Haven’t parents always had a choice?
TP: Families who can afford to pay the tuition at parochial and independent schools have always had choices if they are available. Most school districts assign students based on residence and there is little choice. Too often schools in low-income neighborhoods are underresourced and equity issues arise. Choice can help level the playing field and give parents alternatives beyond their local neighborhood school. Principals and teachers must think differently about how to attract students to their schools and become proactive in communicating what they have to offer. In short, they must define their school brand and market it. The skills required must have a higher priority in leadership programs in education.
MH: We think about leadership as being about change and entrepreneurship about the pursuit of opportunities without regard to resources one currently has control over. Leadership in education needs to be entrepreneurial because, guess what? You don’t and can’t often control the resources that you need.
Can you give us an example of this?
TP: Yes. Reforming school districts and schools is a major issue. The challenge is how to improve whole systems of schools and not just have a few more good ones. A lot of “entrepreneurial” work is based on the assumption that it is essential to start over or create something completely new — a new school, a new theme, a new leader, and a new staff. The real challenge is how to take effective change and improvement to scale, and this can only be done by working with the high percentage of leaders and staff who remain in school districts and schools as reform is implemented. This is the big challenge for entrepreneurial leaders. Unless we find ways to meet it, we will improve achievement results for some students but continue to leave many behind.
MH: In business speak, people would call that intrapraneurship, when you’re working from the inside to effect change rather than starting to build an organization from scratch. When we talk about entrepreneurial leadership, we can talk about effecting change at a systemic level from the inside out, as well as more traditional forms of entrepreneurship, such as building an organization from the outside in.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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photo by Mark Morelli
