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.

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Featured Work

Managing School Districts for High Performance
Edited by Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen Grossman, and Susan Moore Johnson

Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders.

The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.