Investing in Education

The View from the Chair

By Amy Magin Wong

It was like coming full circle for Academic Dean Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, when he was honored with a professorship endowed by current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the 1960s, Schwartz began his career as an intern in the New York City mayor’s office.

“As someone who has spent his career as a practitioner in governmental, nonprofit, and foundation roles, it is a rare privilege to be given an academic chair,” says Schwartz. “I’m especially honored because the donor is Michael Bloomberg, who has provided such extraordinary leadership in restructuring New York’s education system.”

Bloomberg, a graduate of Harvard Business School, endowed the William Henry Bloomberg Professorship in 1996 in memory of his late father. It supports a series of scholars and practitioners who teach and conduct research in the fields of philanthropic policy and practice, public service and volunteerism, and the effective leadership and management of nonprofit and public institutions.

Under the original terms of the professorship, appointments rotated every two years among five of the university’s faculties — arts and sciences (Harvard College), business, divinity, government (Harvard Kennedy School), and law. However, in 2006, Bloomberg agreed that the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s mission also supports the spirit of the chair, and Schwartz was the first HGSE professor to receive the honor.

“The appointment of an Ed School professor to the Bloomberg chair is recognition of the school’s important role in the nonprofit and public sectors,” said Dean Kathleen Mc- Cartney, at the time of Schwartz’s selection. “It also reflects the tremendous work Bob has done leading the school’s efforts to create new collaborations throughout Harvard and across the world of education.”

Providing and developing education leadership has been a focus of many of Schwartz’s professional endeavors. Prior to joining the faculty in 1996, Schwartz served in a variety of leadership roles in education, most recently as education program director at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And shortly after joining the faculty, he was tapped by a bipartisan group of governors and corporate chief executives to become the first president of Achieve, a national nonprofit created to help states strengthen their education systems.

Over the past several years he has also collaborated with colleagues from the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, pooling their expertise in instructional leadership, management, and policy to create several programs that provide a new model of executive leadership training for top education leaders.

One such collaboration is the Executive Leadership Program for Educators (ExEL), funded by The Wallace Foundation in 2005. Each year, Harvard faculty work with leadership teams from two states and several urban districts to help them become more effective in managing organizational change, leading instructional improvement, and strengthening the relationship between states and districts. This year, Schwartz’s involvement as faculty chair finds him once again in Bloomberg’s neighborhood: New York City education leaders will be participating in the program.

Based on the success of programs like ExEL for established education leaders, Schwartz has led the Ed School’s efforts to develop a new practice-based doctoral program for aspiring leaders, which is likely to launch in the fall of 2010. Ed School faculty will again collaborate with faculty from the Kennedy School and the Business School to offer a powerful new model of preparation for those seeking leadership roles in large urban districts, state and federal education agencies, national and regional nonprofit organizations, and education-related philanthropies, as well as those who aspire to develop and lead their own entrepreneurial education organizations.

“It’s a new way of preparing education leaders by acknowledging that they need different kinds of skills that are best developed by drawing on faculty from the three professional schools, not just from [the] education school,” says Schwartz. “They need to know a lot about the core business of teaching and learning, and child/adolescent development, but also about the management of transformational change in urban school districts or education nonprofits. We think the managerial aspects of their training are best led by business faculty and that Kennedy School faculty are well positioned to teach them about politics and policymaking.”

This cohort-based program will be similar in structure to an MBA program, he says. Participants take a core curriculum together for the first year and then, in the second year, fan out and take electives across the three schools. The third year will consist of what he calls a “medical school–like residency” in partner organizations, such as school districts, state agencies, or nonprofits. “While in residency, [students] will also be working on a capstone project, which won’t be a researchbased dissertation,” he says, “but a project that will flow out of the work they are doing in the organization.”

Schwartz believes that developing education leaders in this new way is crucial to making progress for our country’s current educational environment. “Schools and urban districts, on balance, are getting better than they were, but the pace of change in the larger society — technological, economic, demographic — is outstripping the pace of reform in our schools,” he says. “Although our schools are getting better, they aren’t getting better fast enough.”

He cites the need for new kinds of leaders who are trained differently — who are more entrepreneurial in the way in which they think about leadership, and who can work across an increasingly complicated sector with lots of different players. “I find this to be a very exciting time in education,” Schwartz says. “There is more receptivity to different kinds of ideas and more openness to innovation. And nowhere in America is the spirit of innovation more present than in the leadership that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein are providing for the New York City schools, which makes me especially pleased to be sitting in the Bloomberg Chair.”

— Amy Magin Wong is a frequent contributor to Ed. whose last piece was on the Meade Fellowship.

Illustration by Jeff Hopkins