What if your school could tap into the minds of 25 Harvard PhDs?

by philg

A letter, slightly tweaked, from our local public school district, which runs a small K-8 school:

Happy Valley Public Schools become a WorkPlace Lab for Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program.

… Happy Valley Schools will be the site for fieldwork by 25 graduate students in Harvard’s Doctorate program in Education Leadership (Ed.LD.). This program, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a three-year, full-time multidisciplinary doctorate that prepares graduates to be transformative, system-level leaders in preK-12 education. Each cohort in the program comprises 25 experienced educators, selected from a large number of applicants, and the intensive training includes hands-on experience in local school districts, translating visionary ideas into real-world success. This fall, those 25 students will be doing their fieldwork in Happy Valley.

This massive infusion of brainpower should be awesome, right? Kids in Singapore had better watch out after these 25 high-achievers pump up our academics!

Or can those Asian kids sleep late? It seems that we were able to tell the Harvard geniuses which problems concerned us the most…

The Happy Valley Public Schools leadership had the rewarding challenge of thinking about how best to use the expertise and energy of the 25 experienced educators who are dedicating several weeks of effort to thinking about how to improve our schools. The leadership identified ‘problems of practice’ to serve as focus for the Ed.L.D. initiative:

Social Emotional Learning

What process could we carry out this year as part of our needs-assessment in order to feel prepared to craft a multi-year plan to support the social emotional development and learning for our students across the district? What social emotional content elements should we be attending to?

Public Relations

How could we better communicate with the larger community so that they know of the good work within our schools? What effective ways of communication and promoting the district would be within our resources (given our small size and capacity of administrators)?

Race and Identity

Help us tell the stories of our students’ experiences within our schools as it pertains to race and identity. What does it feel like to be a student of color or a white student?

Collaborative Practice

How can we support teams across the district as a vehicle for driving continued teacher/staff development? What factors, strategies, or approaches have other districts or organizations taken that have led to successful professional learning communities?

So… it turns out that we didn’t ask the young Harvardites for help with improving academic achievement.

11 thoughts on “What if your school could tap into the minds of 25 Harvard PhDs?”

  3. The kids from the Happy Valley Public Schools have no chance of survival even with help from Harvard PHDs. In China (and probably India), K-12 is run like a survival of the fittest boot camp, probably similar to the US Navy Seals training camps. Friends that went to K-12 school in Beijing describe what would be considered torture in Canada or the US. Suicide is considered a method by which the weakest and weak minded are eliminated from society. Happy Valley Public Schools would be better by adopting the Navy Seals training system if the kids are going to have a hope in hell of competing with China.

  4. Harvard goes all out to lower SAT scores of low income American students who Harvard subsidizes to admit less of them and istead admit foreign students who are either from rich families or subsidized by foreign governments and pay full tuition and exuberant housing expesnes to Harvard .

  5. “translating visionary ideas into real-world success.”

    Dr. Greenspun, the problem is clearly the people making the list.

    I think perhaps the demonstrative point here is that perhap the happy valley school board can use this list as a basis to question the leadership skills of the folks who came up with it and see who amongst the 25 phds could help fix the problem that was made apparent in this exercise of coming up with the list. Why not make the seal camp training exercise include the 25 phds. The winner will become the leader!

  6. How is the school’s academic achievement? Perhaps they felt they had that aspect under control.

  7. How is the achievement? Second tier within Massachusetts, which itself is only pretty good among states once you adjust for demographics (because we spend so much time and energy celebrating and advocating for diversity, we have a small percentage of immigrants and non-Asian minorities than other states). See http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/02/09/tiger-parent-on-lexington-massachusetts-public-schools/ for a note on a first-tier Massachusetts school.

    [And even the Massachusetts tiers may be largely a function of demographics. Rich suburban districts are full of parents who scored well on academic tests and children who score well on academic tests. What happens in the classroom may not vary that much.]

    None of these schools are excellent by international standards (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2014/06/21/smartest-kids-in-the-world-american-schools/ ).

  8. Why are there even graduate programs in education (especially research)? What discoveries have they made? What techniques have been invented in the last 25 years which make it so that learning happens at a faster pace or using fewer resources?

  9. Too bad the eggheads don’t put the effort into actually doing something constructive in comparison to the time they had to have wasted writing a fancy letter that could have been shortened by at least 70%.
    That letter read like a money-losing tech company that some Wall Steeet investment bank is trying to take public. A lot of ridiculously superfluous words that all together mean very little. I was waiting for then to slip “synergies” in somewhere.

  10. superMike: I think one reason why there are graduate programs in education is that union-negotiated pay for teachers includes substantial bumps in salary (and therefore pension) when a master’s or PhD is earned. It is also a good deal for universities because there is no need to build lab space and degree-seekers might want to come in the evenings when lecture halls would otherwise be idle. Therefore there is a huge profit opportunity.

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