Thursday, 20 December 2012
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Principals Go Back to School
Kim Lowry, principal of South Elementary, a 500-student school in rural Kennett, Mo., was wary when her superintendent enrolled her in a part-time, two-year business school program. Her school had failed to meet benchmarks under the federal No Child Left Behind law and faced a state takeover. Business classes were the last thing she wanted to do with the money earmarked for improving her school. Says Lowry: “I was very resistant.”
That changed in the summer of 2009, when she attended her first classes at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Under the guidance of professors there, she wrote a plan for transforming her school. That fall she formed teams of teachers that scrutinized student performance, hired consultants to help improve scores on standardized tests, and posted the results of every student in the staff lounge, making teachers publicly accountable for their classes. “I took the best business practices and translated those into education,” says Lowry, who completed the program in January. Her school now meets federal standards, and its test scores jumped by 26 percent in English and 29 percent in math while she was in the program.
The White House wants to help fix 5,000 underperforming schools, and the Education Dept. has distributed more than $4 billion in federal School Improvement Grants in the last few years. That has given school districts both the motivation and the funds to change, and many are turning to Darden for help. Over the last eight years, Darden has worked with nearly 200 schools in 12 states.
This year, 48 schools from Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico are among those enrolled in the program, and state education officials are participating alongside the principals. Those states want to “take [the UVA program] and create it in the Southwest” at a university in the region, says Paul Koehler, director of the Southwest Comprehensive Center, a nonprofit that advises states on how to fix troubled schools.
Some education professionals question whether the results are worth the $75,000-per-school price tag for the two-year program, in which principals attend classes at Darden for a total of 20 days, UVA staffers visit the districts, and participants are in frequent contact with professors. Grover Whitehurst, an education policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, says Darden’s offering needs to be more “rigorously evaluated” if other states are to clone the idea. “It is important, before we start trying to replicate this, that we are pretty confident the results would hold up,” he says. Frederick Hess, an education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says the program may make administrators better managers, but it’s unclear whether they learn how to deal with the toughest challenges, such as negotiations with teachers’ unions.
The program, a collaboration between Darden and UVA’s Curry School of Education, helps principals and administrators approach troubled schools with the eye of a manager, says Executive Director LeAnn Buntrock. Participants examine case studies on companies such as General Electric (GE) and Walt Disney (DIS), study organizational behavior, and learn how to analyze data. “We’re not trying to make businesses out of school systems, but certainly a lot of leadership and business principles apply,” Buntrock says.
After the Cincinnati Public Schools began participating in the program in 2008, the district asked successful administrators and teachers to coach counterparts in struggling schools, and established a program that paired local business leaders with principals. Cincinnati saw 14 of its 16 underperforming schools meet No Child Left Behind standards after the program.
At the first 57 schools that completed the program, reading proficiency increased an average of 33 percent and math scores rose an average of 37 percent, Darden says. But schools in St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo., and on Indian reservations have seen mediocre or negative results, and a handful have withdrawn from the program after the first year.
This spring, Darden will add a “district boot camp” for superintendents and curriculum directors. They’ll attend the additional training session before principals take classes, with the idea that as soon as their schools start the program they’ll be able provide them with adequate support to make necessary changes. Says Buntrock: “This will give them more of a runway so they can hit the ground running.”
The bottom line: A $75,000 B-school program for principals has improved test scores, but some experts say it may do little to fix the toughest problems.
For U.S. MBAs, Going Global Has Never Been Easier
Ever since the U.S. economic crisis hit in 2008, business school insiders have speculated that increasing numbers of graduating MBAs would head overseas for jobs. This hasn’t happened. If anything, fewer graduates of top programs are heading overseas for work. At eight of Bloomberg Businessweek’s top 10 full-time programs, the percentage of graduates taking positions outside North America was down or flat in 2011, compared to 2008. The exceptions were Harvard Business School, from which 20 percent of graduates went overseas in 2011, up from 18 percent in 2008, and University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, at which 19 percent of graduates took overseas jobs in 2011, up from 12 percent in 2008.
While a greater number of MBA students from the U.S. show interest in emerging markets, they are not working overseas in larger numbers, despite double-digit growth in demand for MBA talent in India, China, Brazil, and Russia, say business school career-services directors. At University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, about 9 percent of American MBAs typically work abroad, a percentage that has remained consistent. “It’s always been just a fact of life around here that our MBAs work abroad,” says Maryellen Reilly Lamb, director of MBA career management at Wharton.
What is different, say the directors, is the desire by recruiters to hire people who are willing to go abroad in the future and who have the correct documentation such as work visas to do so—along with the willingness on the part of potential employees to do just about anything for the right job. “We encourage students to have an open mind,” says Marilyn Eckelman, director of graduate management career strategies at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. “MBAs are really re-starting their careers. The economy and job market over the last couple of years has persuaded students to be more open to geographic flexibility and mobility.”
MBA graduates will make concessions for the right opportunities. Ronald Rolph, a 2011 graduate of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business who served in the military before attending business school, was looking forward to working stateside. Still, he turned down an offer for a position in the United States to work for the same private company in a preferred role that combines engineering, construction, and project management in the mining and metals industry in Santiago, Chile.
Rolph, who was not at liberty to identify his new employer, says his dream of working in the U.S. is far from dead. “Just because you go overseas initially does not mean you’re relegating yourself to working overseas for the rest of your career,” says Rolph.
Americans who opt to take overseas jobs after graduating from U.S. MBA programs account for only a portion of those pursuing careers on foreign soil. Many decide to pursue an international career before setting foot on campus, then choose an international program.
While two-thirds of London Business School graduates launch their post-MBA careers in London, only 20 percent of them are still working there five years later, says Fiona Sandford, director of career services at LBS. Many students, she adds, come to the program for its multicultural environment, hoping to create a resume that global companies will find appealing. While LBS grads also find work in emerging markets and others around the world, Sandford suggests that students stay abreast of immigration policies so they know exactly where they are eligible to work and are more likely to be hired.
A willingness to work overseas, while attractive to employers, will only get you so far. Having the right skills—from the ability to speak a foreign language to knowledge of a region’s economy and business practices—is equally important, says the Carroll School’s Eckelman. If the opportunity is right, she adds, graduates and employers can usually overcome those kinds of challenges.
“Explore all your options and don’t rule anything out,” Rolph advises. “Generally speaking, Americans have a U.S.-centric mindset and that’s an outdated point of view. Look globally. It’s the wave of the future.”
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