The Strategic School

Karen Hawley Miles is executive director and founder of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit organization in Boston, Massachusetts, that specializes in strategic planning, organization, and resource allocation in urban public school districts. Her work aims to help states, districts, and schools rethink resource allocation and empower principals to create great schools and redirect resources to promote excellent teaching, individual attention for children, and productive instructional time. Miles has worked intensively with urban districts in Los Angeles, Chicago, Albuquerque, Boston, Baltimore, Providence, Rochester and Cincinnati to deeply analyze and improve their funding systems, school-level resource use, and investment in professional development. She has taught school leaders at Harvard University, in school districts, with New Leaders for New Schools, and with the Broad Institute for School Boards. Currently, she directs a multiyear project funded by the Gates Foundation to understand the costs and organization of small schools and to help districts organize to better support them. Prior to her work at Education Resource Strategies, she worked at Bain & Company as a strategy and management consultant for hospitals and corporations. She has a BA in economics from Yale University and a doctorate in education from Harvard University, specializing in school organization, change, and finance. Stephen Frank is the cofounder of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit corporation that works with urban superintendents across the country to improve student performance through more effective use of resources. He has worked as a consultant with school systems in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington DC, Baltimore, Rochester, Albuquerque, and Oakland, among others. Frank has helped create strategic leadership training programs and tools that have been used in principal training programs across the country. He specializes in helping educators better measure how funds travel through school systems; how schools actually use the time, people, and money they receive; and how school system processes must change to improve student performance through using resources more effectively. Frank has worked for global strategy consulting firm Bain & Company, taught at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University, and founded and ran a private language school. He is a former Fulbright Fellow.

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments About the Authors Part I. The "Big Three" Guiding Resource Strategies 1. Why Rethink School Resources Now? 2. How Do Resources Matter? Part II. How Strategic Schools Use People, Time, and Money 3. Investing in Teaching Quality 4. Creating Individual Attention and Personal Learning Environments 5. Maximizing Academic Time and Linking It to Learning Needs Part III. How to Make the Most of Your School's People, Time, and Money 6. Tools for Strategic Schools: How Well Does Your School Use People, Time, and Money? 7. How to Group Students and Assign Teachers 8. How to Craft a Master Schedule That Works 9. How to Strategically Improve Teaching Quality 10. Putting It All Together 11. Redefining Systems and Policies to Support Strategic Schools References Index

"Too often, educators think that the greatest resource we can get is more funding to hire more staff. This book shows that a lot can be done by re-examining the current use of our resources." -- Sue Belish, Superintendent "This book made me rethink how to spend in a more creative manner that allows all students to benefit. The resource worksheets are very helpful for both the veteran and rookie administrator working to prioritize and re-evaluate effective means of spending limited funding." -- Dana Salles Trevethan, Principal "How you spend your resources really does speak to the ethics, morals, and values about what is important. As a former principal and now district administrator, I use these ideas each day to help schools leverage their resources in strategic and creative ways to meet students' needs." -- Mary Nash, Assistant Superintendent "A powerful new lens for looking at school resources by fundamentally changing the question from 'How much money do schools need to succeed?' to 'How well are resources being used to ensure student success?' The careful review of research and the practical case studies from the authors' extensive experience provide practitioners, administrators, and school developers with a deep understanding of effective resource use and the tools to turn that knowledge into an strategy that works for kids." -- Richard Murnane, Economist and Professor