Stein, 42, came to education leadership in a roundabout way. Childhood in the Chicago suburbs led her to Grinnell College; her first jobs were at Planned Parenthood and the Mission Neighborhood Health Center. After a stint living and working in Mexico, Stein's Spanish-language work on California's anti-tobacco campaign led her to the University of San Francisco and, eventually, to a doctorate in Administration and Policy Analysis at Stanford. She became part of the Baruch College faculty in 1997, as an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs. Then she was recruited by city Department of Education (DOE) leaders to help develop the Leadership Academy to train new principals for the city's hardest-to-serve public schools. She worked for founding CEO Bob Knowling, rising to the CEO position in April 2005.
The Leadership Academy answers to DOE but is not a public entity. Initial plans for three years of private funding were expanded in December 2005 to a five-year timeframe (now with partial public support from the DOE, in the form of salary compensation for principals in training and other aspiring leaders). This spring, the chancellor left the Academy's board, ahead of the DOE's request for proposals for leadership-development services. The Leadership Academy, along with other agencies, companies and nonprofits, will compete for the contract, which will be awarded this July. Although the Academy's set-up is unusual, it is not alone; school districts in Houston and Charlotte have or are building similar training organizations, while others contract out with a New York City-based group called New Leaders for New Schools (a likely competitor for the contract).
City Limits spoke with Stein about the Academy's current work, future plans and her reflections on its first five years. Here are highlights from two conversations.
The Leadership Academy is patterned to some extent on corporate leadership programs. Can you talk about importing business principles into the academic environment?
Most successful corporations invest in talent development, and the Department of Education wanted an arm that did that. As far as the actual business principles, some strategies need to be translated so that they apply to an education environment. There are a lot of tools that you can take that are more common to corporate America, but you can't just take them as they are – they need to be adapted. In the business sector, if you make Oreo cookies, and you fire somebody, the consumers of Oreo cookies aren't going to come complaining. Whereas you could have a teacher who is really not doing very much on behalf of children, who's still beloved by the parents. So it's not, "use this matrix to figure out who you're firing and then fire them." It's more complex.
