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The Strategic School

Making the Most of People, Time, and Money

By: Karen Hawley Miles, Stephen Frank

This book offers numerous strategies and case studies that illustrate how to invest in teacher quality and improve learning environments through creative allocation of existing resources.

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Product Details

Grade Level: PreK-12
ISBN: 9781412904179
Published By: Corwin
Series: Leadership for Learning Series
Year: 2008
Page Count: 232
Publication date: June 28, 2013

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"How you spend your resources really does speak to the ethics, morals, and values about what is important. 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
Boston Public Schools, MA

"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?'"
—Richard Murnane, Economist and Professor
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Strategically reorganize school resources to support instructional and performance priorities!

How can schools best use the resources they already have? That question is at the heart of this inspiring book for school and district administrators challenged with increasing student performance without additional funding. Exploring the link between purposeful resource allocation and academic achievement, Karen Hawley Miles and Stephen Frank demonstrate how educational leaders can develop successful and strategic schools by assessing how well they use all available resources—people, time, and money—and by creating effective alternatives to meet goals.

The authors use their extensive research with urban schools and districts to present case studies of schools that successfully reorganized resources to implement the "Big 3 Guiding Resource Strategies": improving teaching quality, creating individual attention, and maximizing academic time. The Strategic School offers planning guides, checklists, worksheets, and strategies aligned with ISLLC standards to help leaders:

Assess current resource use in new ways that go beyond the typical budget review
Organize resources more creatively and flexibly
Craft a master schedule that works
Connect resource allocation to student and school performance

Key features

Part of the Leadership for Learning series
Aligned with ISLCC standards

Author(s)

Karen Hawley Miles

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

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.

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

“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
Sheridan County School District #1, Ranchester, WY

"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
Turlock High School, CA

“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
Boston Public Schools, MA

"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
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Other Titles in: Finance/Funding/Grantwriting | Leadership

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