The central offices of large urban school districts are, in many ways, quite similar to the corporate centers of large corporations or other organizations. When designed effectively, these centers ensure that their key operating units – whether a handful of related businesses or a diverse set of units in thousands of locations – can achieve their shared performance goals (in terms of income and other key metrics). Similarly, the central offices of large urban school districts exist to ensure that their primary operating units – individual schools – consistently produce effective teaching and learning, which has the most direct impact on the district’s performance goals (in terms of student outcome and other metrics). The central offices of most large urban school districts, however, often are seen as ineffective bureaucracies, which impede, rather than enhance, the core efforts of their schools to improve student outcomes (Ucelli, Foley & Mishook 2007).

While nearly all large urban school districts regularly articulate ambitious goals and produce strategic plans to achieve them, few have rigorously evaluated the role their central offices should play to ensure the success of those strategies. Instead, most central offices control a wide range of activities – from setting curricular policies and providing related training to recruiting and placing staff in schools to managing school facilities and providing backoffice services – for historical reasons, as opposed to clear strategic rationale or even an understanding of the specific value they provide to support effective teaching and learning in their schools. As a result, there is often a misalignment between what the central office of a large urban district does and what the schools might actually need.

There is a growing recognition that to meet the ambitious goals of large urban school districts – in terms of dramatically improved student outcomes and elimination of achievement gaps – a significant revamping of the central offices is necessary (Ucelli, Foley & Mishook 2007). To that end, large urban school districts might look to the experiences of corporations or other large organizations with effective corporate centers.

Specifically, such organizations recognize the challenges of managing large, complex entities centrally and push to define a smaller “true” corporate center, responsible only for those activities with a clear rationale for centralization, such as significant strategic advantages or economies of scale. These organizations also restructure their centers explicitly around delivering these narrowed sets of activities.

To be sure, there is great variation in the effectiveness of corporate centers, and not all examples from the private or other sectors are relevant for large urban school districts. Nonetheless, the experiences of corporations or organizations – for which the impact of effective organizational design on their performance has been recognized (see, generally, Bryan & Joyce 2007) – can be instructive.