Faculty and Research

Stacey Childress is a Senior Lecturer in the General Management unit at Harvard Business School, and a co-founder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. Stacey studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. This includes the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit and for-profit enterprises with missions to improve the public system.  She is also interested more generally in a range of social enterprise topics, including international social entrepreneurship.

She has authored more than two dozen case studies about large urban districts and entrepreneurial education ventures, and is the co-author of the Harvard Business Review article, "How to Manage Urban Districts." Stacey is also a co-editor of the book Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership, Harvard Education Press, November 2007.

Stacey teaches in Harvard Business School's MBA program, where she has won the Student Association teaching award from the students in her Entrepreneurship in Education course. In 2008, she was an inaugural recipient of the Charles M. Williams Award for excellence in teaching, named in honor of one of the School's most celebrated case method teachers.  She also teaches in executive education programs at HBS and around Harvard.

Before working in academia, Stacey was a co-founder of an enterprise software company and spent ten years in a Fortune 500 company in sales and general management. Early in her career, she taught in a Texas public high school. She is a graduate of Baylor University and Harvard Business School, where she was the first woman in school history to be elected by her classmates to deliver the class day graduation address.