SOM Dean Details Broad Vision

Aspiring school superintendents will soon pour into Yale’s School of Management for lessons in how to close a budget deficit, retain staff, and deal with journalists.

They’ll do that at SOM’s new Broad Center, funded with an historic $100 million gift from Los Angeles billionaire and charter school supporter Eli Broad.

SOM Dean Kerwin Charles Monday detailed his vision for the center in a conversation with the Independent, two weeks after the announcement of Broad’s gift. (Read a previous story here detailing the gift.)

The Broad Center will ​“provide leadership training to people who will govern and manage school systems in the public education sphere,” Charles said. They’ll do that on three separate tracks that should begin next summer, he explained.

Yale will offer a masters in management studies that will focus on leadership training, with extra school-specific classes, say, on inequality, race and law.

The candidates ​“need to know how to teach, but we don’t do that,” Charles said. ​“They need to know how to manage a budget, how to understand prices, how to organize and lead. Those things I mentioned are things we do here.”

Yale will also offer non-degree courses during the summer months. These might be refresher courses for experienced administrators, like crisis management.

“Lots of people recognize where human capital can be augmented, but they can’t imagine taking a year off to get a full degree,” Charles said.

Finally, Yale will open a data repository that will collect information about the way systems work, like educator career duration, teacher turnover rates, philanthropic partnerships and budget spending. It will also include advice from the program’s graduates about what they’ve learned on the job.

The data will be about whatever ​“comes within the attention of a CEO type in the school system,” Charles said. ​“Our focus will not be on the best way to teach third-grade drawing,” he gave as an example. ​“That’s an important thing in education, but it’s not what the School of Management can do.”

Using that information, Yale will hold conferences about big topics in education, like disciplinary policy or multilingual instruction. Charles said that because Yale does not have a school of education, it will be particularly important for the center to bring in a wide variety of experts.

“There is not a school of education here, which imposes upon us a greater responsibility to our community to invite and work on inviting people with relevant expertise,” Charles said. ​“Who are the best people thinking and arguing about these thoughts? It’s an imperative that might not be as salient [at another university]. Our very circumstance says reach out, connect, engage in order to do the kind of thing we hope to do.”

Would there be any connection to New Haven’s public schools?

“When I think about what will be happening under the master’s track, remember our mission is to train leaders of a whole school system, so what we have in mind are in fact overseeing things,” like a superintendent, Charles said. ​“There exist such people in New Haven school system, and it is our hope that they engage with us. But our program is not really on, say, engaging closely with high-school teachers — unless those people aspire [to become administrators]. We would not only hope they come, we’ll reach out enthusiastically to try to welcome them.”

Charles came to Yale six months ago from the University of Chicago, where he taught about public policy. His research focused on inequality, often racial, like discrimination on the job market and wealth accumulation between generations.

That work confirmed the value of education as a tool of social mobility, even though certain groups are still ​“disproportionately excluded” from its benefits, he said.

“The consistent theme of [my] work is that inequality remains incredibly durable in American society and delimiting of life prospects for people at the bottom,” he said. ​“The mechanism by which people can escape — we hope — being trapped is through education. But access to this delivery method, as it were, is not evenly distributed: the children’s socioeconomic backgrounds, their parents’ wealth, their race, their location all affects how well they fare.”

He said that’s why, even though he’d just arrived in New Haven this year, he immediately agreed to join the Dalio-funded Partnership for Connecticut’s governing board. He said he hoped it would be ​“a true partnership between business and government, practitioners and policy-makers.”

Charles said he wasn’t sure how the two initiatives will connect, ​“if at all.” He said the Broad Foundation didn’t know that he’d also be working with the Dalio Philanthropies, until they’d already agreed to donate.

Gov. Ned Lamont said that the $100 million donations from Broad and Dalio offer Connecticut a chance to define itself by what’s happening in its schools.

“Nothing is more important than having the right teacher in the classroom and nothing’s more important than leadership. I think you find that across sectors, none more so than education,” Lamont said. ​“I think it’s extraordinary, the opportunity we have to take the lead here in Connecticut, thanks to these two incredibly generous contributions and what that’s going to mean for our students.”