Out with the old: university-based school administration programs are incoherent, undercapitalized, and disconnected from the districts where graduates are most likely to seek employment. There is much to be learned from the way business and the military train their leaders - forum

Education Next, Fall, 2003 by Marc Tucker

As opposed to the highly integrated curriculum that is common in the nation's business schools, programs in educational administration typically comprise an assortment of courses that do not add up to a coherent curriculum. Graduates we surveyed said that the courses they valued most were those that consisted mainly of war stories told by former school administrators, because they at least had the ring of authenticity. Only rarely do university curricula for training school administrators reflect the goals and strategies of the nearby school districts in which the trainees are most likely to serve. Most important, these prospective school administrators are rarely given a plausible answer to the $64,000 question: How do I lead my school to an unprecedented improvement in student performance?

The Rise of the Corporate University

Education today faces a situation similar to the one faced by American business in the 1980s. At the time, enormous American firms, household names like Xerox and Ford, found themselves fighting for their lives against challengers from overseas that were making higher quality products and selling them for less.

Firms that met this challenge knew that they would have to redesign their operations if they were to survive. But then the top executives realized something very important. Their plans required enormous changes in values, attitudes, and behavior throughout these global firms. Those changes could be accomplished only if the strategies at the heart of the plan were understood by managers at every level of the company. Suddenly, a function--management training--that had been buried in some obscure branch of the Human Resources division had become the key to corporate survival.

So it was pulled up into the executive office and christened as the corporate university, the aim of which was to communicate the corporate strategy to all the line managers in the firm and to provide them with the skills needed to carry it out. The faculty consisted mainly of the top executives in the firm. Jack Welch claimed to have never missed class as a professor in General Electric's corporate university. David Kearns, the CEO who engineered Xerox's return from the brink of bankruptcy, trained the managers who reported directly to him in the new Xerox disciplines. In turn, they did the same with their employees, until the training had cascaded down the entire line.

These firms didn't turn to the nation's business schools because they felt that these schools had never been particularly responsive to their needs. When all this happened, of course, the business schools got quite nervous. Thus were born the modern executive-education programs offered by university-based business schools, for senior executives who typically already hold an M.B.A. Students are selected by their employers as members of teams. The firms pay a premium price to the university (as much as $90,000 per person for a two-year nonresidential program) to have those executives gain the skills needed to be on the cutting edge of business change. The programs faculty comprises business school professors and the top executives in the firm. A major component of the curriculum is "action projects" defined by the firm. Teams apply what they are learning to real-world problems their firms are facing.