SEA as Portfolio Manager: Strategic Leadership that Leverages Local-Level Expertise

_{Ash Solar, Executive Director of Achievement Schools, helps paint over concrete near Westside Achievement Middle School in Memphis, Tenn. Friday, Aug. 1, 2014. LifeLine to Success' Blight Patrol and the Achievement School District in Frayser teamed up to raise awareness on the importance of safe passages to school. (AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, William DeShazer)}

RCEd Commentary

“Our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it,” Harvard Business School Professor Linda Hill explained in a September 2014 TED talk on leadership for innovation.

The innovative leaders Hill studied didn’t try to solve every problem themselves; instead, they began to see the people at the bottom of their organizational pyramids—the people closest to their customers—as the source of innovation.

The SEA as Portfolio Manager

This approach can be powerful for state education agencies (SEAs). By enabling those “closest to the customers”—in this case, educators who work with students every day—to unleash their insights about what works, SEAs can be more efficient and find more effective, innovative ways to support schools and students.

This is why I encourage state education leaders to think of their SEA as a portfolio manager – a comparison not as radical as it may seem. Financial portfolio managers oversee their clients’ investment options, and SEAs manage families’ education options. Financial portfolio managers help safeguard their clients’ financial futures, and SEAs help set the vision and provide the resources to prepare all students for life after graduation. In most cases, both leave the ultimate decisions for how to achieve these ends up to the people they serve.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education has adopted this analogy and helped school systems across the country implement what they call a “portfolio strategy” with seven components aimed at giving families the educational options and freedom to choose what’s best for their children. It also empowers principals to decide what’s best for their schools. Schools must still meet performance standards, but in essence, this model relinquishes some decision making power to those who are closest to the students.

Tools to Reframe the SEA’s Role

The portfolio manager approach underlines the critical importance for SEAs to be thoughtful and strategic about entrusting districts and schools with certain responsibilities. To help state leaders do this, the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program recently developed a concise discussion guide, Roles and Responsibilities of the State Education Agency. It invites leaders to consider their current legal and political context to determine the essential functions of their SEA, what other activities it may want to be engaged in, and—perhaps most helpfully—which functions SEAs should stop (or never start) doing.

Thankfully, many changes to an SEA’s work—or changes to how responsibilities are distributed among an SEA, LEAs (including districts as well as non-traditional operators, and their schools) won’t require legal modifications. It’s quite likely, however, that policies and procedures must be modified to support the SEA’s role as a “steerer” instead of a “rower,” as David Osborne and Ted Gaebler have described the role in Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. The recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act is a perfect opportunity for SEAs to reexamine how they steer education policy as they gain greater flexibility and autonomy; although it may be tempting continue rowing, SEAs can act as a portfolio manager and empower local leaders to take the oars.

Lessons from Tennessee

When Tennessee revised its math, language arts, and science curriculum standards a few years ago, the SEA used grant money to provide training for all teachers in the state, because the new standards affected all teachers. But the SEA didn’t actually conduct the training--teachers did, while the SEA facilitated the training—finding venues, communicating opportunities, and providing materials and help for teachers who led the sessions. Because state leaders resisted the impulse to do everything, and let school operators and educators handle those activities they were best equipped to take on, the training was a success: According to a state evaluation, the trainings had significant positive effects on teachers’ instruction and students’ learning. It’s also important to note that the SEA strategically staffed and sequenced this initiative without cutting corners on cost or dosage.

For states considering a similar initiative without additional grant funding like Tennessee had, the SEA must prioritize resources, reallocating funding from other, less effective uses to support this new strand of work.

SEAs have a powerful opportunity to reexamine their role and find creative new ways to empower local leadership. They should, as Hill put it, “create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius.” Collective genius is exactly what we need to prepare all students for success in college and careers. It’s up to SEAs review their approach, be deliberate and strategic about their roles, and tap into what might be their richest resource of all—educators in the classroom.