Getting Principals to Think Like Managers

Kim Lowry, principal of South Elementary, a 500-student school in rural Kennett, Mo., was wary when her superintendent enrolled her in a part-time, two-year business school program. Her school had failed to meet benchmarks under the federal No Child Left Behind law and faced a state takeover. Business classes were the last thing she wanted to do with the money earmarked for improving her school. Says Lowry: “I was very resistant.”

That changed in the summer of 2009, when she attended her first classes at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Under the guidance of professors there, she wrote a plan for transforming her school. That fall she formed teams of teachers that scrutinized student performance, hired consultants to help improve scores on standardized tests, and posted the results of every student in the staff lounge, making teachers publicly accountable for their classes. “I took the best business practices and translated those into education,” says Lowry, who completed the program in January. Her school now meets federal standards, and its test scores jumped by 26 percent in English and 29 percent in math while she was in the program.