Transforming Public Education

Stacey M. Childress is a senior lecturer in the General Management Unit at Harvard Business School, and a cofounder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. She studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. This includes the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit and for-profit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. Childress is also interested more generally in a range of social enterprise topics, including international social entrepreneurship.

She has authored more than two dozen case studies about large urban districts and entrepreneurial education ventures. Stacey is also a coauthor of Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools, Harvard Education Press, 2009, and a coeditor of Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership, Harvard Education Press, 2007.

Childress teaches in Harvard Business School’s MBA program, where she has won the Student Association teaching award from the students in her Entrepreneurship in Education course. In 2008, she was an inaugural recipient of the Charles M. Williams Award for excellence in teaching, named in honor of one of the School’s most celebrated case method teachers.