Education School, GSB join efforts to help redesign schools

BY LISA TREI

In a new joint initiative, education and business experts plan to share knowledge from their respective fields to help redesign schools for the future.

To kick off the venture, Stanford's School of Education and Graduate School of Business will sponsor a symposium Oct. 23 called "Developing Educational Entrepreneurship: Redesigning Schools for the 21st Century."

"U.S. schools are now being asked to do something they have never before attempted -- succeed at teaching all students to high standards," said education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond. "These new demands cannot be met without changing the core technology of schools -- how they are organized to support more powerful teaching and more in-depth learning. Just as American businesses have had to restructure to increase their flexibility and productivity, so schools need fundamental redesign. And we need to develop the leaders who can accomplish this."

The daylong symposium at the Arrillaga Alumni Center is hosted by the new Stanford Educational Leadership Institute (SELI), a joint venture of the two graduate schools.

"While considerable energy has been invested in studying and promoting educational reform, the field has increasingly come to view schools as 'organizations' and superintendents and principals as leaders," said James Phills, acting associate professor of organizational behavior at the Business School. "This shift highlights the tremendous potential to foster educational innovation by drawing on the extensive knowledge about organizational effectiveness and leadership that has been developed in the business world." Phills is co-director of the school's new Center for Social Innovation, which supports adapting business knowledge and experience to strengthen the nonprofit sector.

Participants at the symposium will examine recent innovations in school redesign and explore how to create high-performing school organizations by integrating knowledge and experiences from both education and business management, said SELI Director Mo-Yun Lei. The symposium will focus on the core issue of emerging leadership in the redesign of existing urban schools and the creation of new school models that promote excellence and equity, she added.