James Harvey recently retired as the Executive Director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. He was a Senior Fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and was a member of the Danforth Forum’s advisory board. Earlier, he served in the Carter administration and on the staff of the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He helped write A Nation at Risk (1983) and co-authored A Legacy of Learning with David Kearns, former CEO of the Xerox Corporation (Washington: Brookings Press, 2000). He holds a doctorate from Seattle University.
This report is the conclusion of an extensive six-year national study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The authors criticize school finance systems for being outmoded and not linked to student results and offer a four-part action plan for overhauling today’s school finance systems.
This report summarizes a meeting of leaders from charter management organizations, school districts, and foundations to address the question of charter expansion and provides concrete recommendations for those interested in creating a more hospitable environment for charter school growth in cities or nationwide.
Based on a survey and on interviews with superintendents from the nation’s largest urban districts, this study explores the working life of urban superintendents.
This is the research brief for the second report in the Center’s leadership series; an examination of large-district school superintendents.
This report finds that although some districts and areas are experiencing difficulties finding good school principals, there are far more candidates interested in assuming school leadership roles than there are principal vacancies to fill.
Many foundations have put funds into urban school reform. The paper suggests that foundation giving needs to be backed up by a clear theory of change and that foundation officials need to know whether the districts in which they plan to work or are already working match the foundation’s interests.