High-Performance Schools

How urban districts can transform themselves using business models.

By John Simmons

The failure of large urban school systems to educate students is achingly familiar to anyone who has followed the plight of public education in this country.

“The typical child in the typical school—especially the poor child of color in the urban school—lives in an educational environment of deep and pathological incoherence and ineffectiveness,” Harvard University professor Richard F. Elmore has written.

This perennial story is unfortunate and strangely ironic. Why? Because we know how to transform organizations and make them more successful—we just need leaders who want to apply...