UVa gets grant for leaders
By Aaron Kessler / Daily Progress staff writer
July 3, 2006
The University of Virginia has been awarded a $5 million grant from the New York-based Wallace Foundation to provide leadership training for education officials.
The program, which will target state and district K-12 education leaders, will begin this summer and continue for up to five years. The Curry School of Education and the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration will jointly run the program through their Partnership for Leaders in Education program.
Over the next five years, UVa expects to provide training for up to 300 participants from six different states. The first year the focus will be on two states - Delaware and Indiana - with two more states being added every year.
David Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education, said the Wallace Foundation has been working with school principals over the last several years, but ultimately concluded that without getting those higher up the food chain on board, those efforts could only go so far.
“If the superintendent and those at the state level aren’t in sync with the principal, they can blunt the progress,” Breneman said.
As a result, the foundation approached eight universities last summer, including UVa, and invited them to apply for the multi-million-dollar grants. At the end of August, teams from each of the universities traveled to the foundation’s New York headquarters for an initial meeting. It quickly became clear one aspect would be critical for receiving the grants: the ability for a university’s school of education and its business school to work together. They even gave an example of one place this was being done successfully - UVa.
“That was pretty amusing,” Breneman said. “I figured at that point [the grant] was ours to lose.”
After spending months crafting a detailed proposal, UVa was ultimately chosen by the Wallace Foundation as one of two schools to get the grants. Harvard University got the other grant. Each institution will be given $5 million over five years, with the goal of bringing business leadership skills to mid-career administrators at the state and district level.
Matthias Hild, who chairs the executive committee for UVa’s Partnership for Leadership in Education, said the same business tools that corporate leaders have come to trust can be quite useful in an educational setting.
“What they need doesn’t really differ a whole lot from what you need in the business world,” Hild said. “You run into the same issue when it comes to diagnosing the problem and working to find a solution.”
Hild said this will be the first time high-level school officials will be targeted in such a way.
“Nobody’s ever pulled off a program like this,” he said. “We need to bring into alignment the school boards, principals and state officials.”
Breneman said the two key variables in education are the quality of the teachers and the quality of the leaders.
“The [Wallace] Foundation felt there were others already working on the teacher side, but not so much on the leadership side,” he said. “So that’s where we’ll come in.”
The first participants in the program will begin their training at the end of July.
Contact Aaron Kessler at (434) 964-5476 or akessler@
dailyprogress.com.
