Just got back last night after competing in the Education Leadership Case Competition up at Berkeley over the weekend. This year’s competition focuses on the DC Public Schools system and the nationally recognized work of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In just one year, the Chancellor and her staff have taken dramatic steps to reform the DC Public School system. The case focused specifically on the new Human Capital initiative and building recommendations around teacher recruitment and retention strategy for DC Public Schools. It was a subject I knew little about, but definitely learned a ton over the past week.
The case was sent out to us last Friday, 2/13. We initially thought it would be a short 5-10 page case that our team could easily read over and start brainstorming. That was definitely not the case (pun intended). Trying to read a 34 page case on a Friday afternoon was a fruitless effort so after about 10 pages, we called it a day. We spent the next couple of days brainstorming and putting together ideas and throwing around concepts until we finally found one that stuck. Took a flight up to Berkeley on Thursday and worked for another 2 days straight. We barely got a total of 5 hours of sleep on Thursday and Friday night. It was intense…
On Saturday, we woke up around 7am to do a final run of the presentation and started heading over to Haas. The teams were randomly selected to present based on the number drawn out of a hat and had 15 minutes to complete their presentation along with a 10 minute Q&A. We watched as each team was selected to present anxiously waiting our turn. Running on about 2 hours of sleep, caffeine, and adrenaline, we were finally selected around 3pm to present our case. I felt we did pretty well covering a variety of recommendations including a teacher support system for retention, two distinct pipelines for recruiting, and even a ‘teacher kibbutz’ for a nice shared teacher experience in DC.
We didn’t end up winning the case competition, but being one of 10 teams selected for this along with Berkeley, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, NYU, Stanford, and Yale, did make for a fun competition and learning experience. It was exciting to see and meet so many MBAs who were passionate about education reform and taking their business skills to change the world. Too bad we were so exhausted after the whole ordeal, we ended up grabbing a quick bite to eat at Berkeley’s famous Top Dog Hot Dogs and went to bed at 8pm. Haven’t slept so well in a long time…
USC Marshall 2009 Education Leadership Case Competition Team
—–
For those of you interested in a career in education as an MBA, there are many options out there including Education Pioneers, Broad Residency, Teach for America, as well as a number of charter schools and public school systems. Let me know if you have any questions.
Read the full article: 2009 Education Leadership Case Competition