Scale-Up for Excellence:

What Can Public Education Leaders Learn from Corporate America?

The Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota is engaged in a three-year project designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public charter schools through:

1. Identifying corporate lessons learned about scaling up excellent products and services via franchising, replication, market expansion, and other strategies;

2. Identifying best practices in collaboration and resource-sharing that have been developed by independent small businesses and non-profits;

3. Analyzing and sharing these lessons and best practices with the charter and broader public school community;

4. Implementing these lessons and best practices in selected charter schools across the country;

Background

While some public charter schools are doing an outstanding job of improving student achievement, many have achieved only modest success. Nationwide we must expand access to effective charter schools, especially given that in many state’s charter public schools enroll a higher percentage of low-income students and students of color than district public schools. Increasing the rate and quality of charter school scale-up efforts and increasing collaboration among stand-alone charters are two important strategies that can help increase access to high quality charter public schools.

Many private sector companies have successfully scaled up and created consistent, high quality products and services in a variety of locations. Small businesses have in some cases found ways to collaborate that help them improve their products/services and visibility. The Center for School Change believes that there are important lessons to be learned from these organizations – lessons that many schools could implement to improve their own effectiveness and more effectively scale-up.

How can you help?

We are meeting with senior corporate executives in companies that have experienced successful organizational growth while maintaining excellent products, services, and working conditions. We’d like to meet with you for no more than an hour, ask a few questions, and learn about leadership development, organizational growth and quality, learning from mistakes, and organizational culture (specific questions on following page). Your responses will be summarized and shared along with the responses of other corporate leaders.

Participation in this interview is strictly voluntary. You are under no obligation to participate and there are no consequences for choosing not to participate.

Scale-Up for Excellence:

What Can Education Leaders Learn from Corporate America?

Interview Questions

Leadership development

In your experience, what are the two or three most important things that [your company] does to develop leaders at all levels of the organization?

Growth and quality

What strategies does [your company] use to ensure quality throughout your operations as you expand to new markets and/or new industries?

Learning from mistakes

All organizations make decisions that later seem like mistakes. Would you share an example of a mistake that was made at [your company] and how the company learned from that mistake?

Organizational culture

How does [your company] nurture an organizational culture that values both innovation and quality?

Additional lessons for public education

Given what you know about public education, what are one or two thing that you think [your company] has learned that public educators should try to adopt or adapt?