Blending of Business and Education Principles

The SELI partnership between the Stanford Graduate School of Business and School of Education is symbolic of the future Stanford envisions in which the existing boundaries and distinctions between the for-profit and non-profit sectors will become less pronounced, if not disappear.  Social-purpose organizations will adopt, to a greater extent, the values of performance and accountability that are commonly accepted in the private sector.  Corporations and business executives will manage their enterprises with a greater sense of responsibility and concern for social impact.  The social sector and its stewards will be accorded the respect and resources that they deserve, as well as the flexibility to innovate in responsible ways.  Eventually, leading-edge management theory and research will be derived from the study of nonprofits, including new model schools, and changes in education organization theory will be derived from the study of the nexus between strategic innovation, entrepreneurship, and schooling.  

Stanford University’s location within Silicon Valley allows it to take advantage of the many research and teaching opportunities created by innovative nonprofits and philanthropic ventures springing up throughout the Valley.  It permits faculty to draw on the lessons provided by this laboratory of entrepreneurship.  SELI faculty consult with local executives, practitioners and philanthropists in the development of professional development programs, research projects and teaching materials.

Drawing on interdisciplinary faculty and research, SELI promotes a re-examination of school leadership: who leads, how they lead across various contexts, and what organizational structures and systems enable leaders to create high performing schools.  Understanding that educational leaders are organizational architects, it is critically important to understand the interrelationships of the instructional and operational features that enable or disable an effective educational system.  Most school reforms fail because they are incremental by design.  These partial reforms (i.e. individual changes in curriculum, scheduling, assessments, decision making, or teaching methods) ultimately bump up against what Seymour Sarason called the other “regularities of schooling” that were unchanged by the partial reform effort.  These disable the intentions of the initiative and ultimately weaken or unravel the reform.

Districts and schools that want to achieve dramatically different outcomes for students must re-consider structural and normative changes including how they:

• Allocate resources, including what kinds of staffing they will use and how they will use time, technology, and financial resources to achieve their goals;
• Hire, support, and evaluate teachers and other staff to support knowledgeable and skillful practice;
• Organize teaching and learning – the core processes of education that all other systems are supposed to support.  This includes defining curriculum, developing assessments that guide learning, and grouping teachers and students together for instruction;
• Set goals; develop standards of learning, practice, and equity; and create vehicles for evaluating progress;
• Identify and solve problems and develop systems for inquiry and improvement;
• Engage parents and community resources in the life of the school; and
• Self-Govern and make decisions in various areas of school life.

In addition, school and district leaders should re-examine how they and others can increase the capacity for learning at all levels of the organization:

• Student Learning: how it takes place, how it is organized and fostered, and how it can be assessed in ways that strengthen the learning process and student outcomes;
• Administrator, Faculty and Staff Learning: how practitioners can grow more expert in their practice and construct a collective practice that is more powerful for students because it is more coherent and reinforcing;
• Organizational Learning: how the structures and routines of schools can be constructed to produce organizations that become increasingly humane, intelligent, supportive of high quality learning, and self-correcting; and

More about the SELI:

• Mission and Background
• Value Proposition in Leadership Development
• Leadership Development Strategy