Diya Gullapalli Iyar ’11Journal #1
This summer I am working as an Education Pioneers Fellow for the New York City Department of Education, which is the largest public school system in the United States. Responsible for organizing 1.1 million students’ academic careers, the NYC DOE has morphed in recent years from a sleepy bureaucracy to a fast-paced start-up, willing to constantly experiment with new practices in order to improve student achievement. My assignment is particularly thrilling because it’s with the DOE’s Office of Performance & Accountability — a relatively new division that aims to best measure and track the reams of school-system data through an innovative online system called ARIS.
Education Pioneers (EP) is a nonprofit that places graduate business, law, education, and public policy students in organizations driving urban education reform nationwide. This summer I am part of EP’s largest NYC cohort to date. The group is comprised of 60 students, including fellow rising second-year MBA students from Columbia Business School, Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, and MIT.
The best part of this job is how I am inspired and moved on a personal level every day of work, whether by the incredibly talented and thoughtful educators and administrators we meet or by the amazing stories of student progress we witness. As a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, I deeply care about educating our citizens and equipping them with the knowledge to win in the economy of the future.
I prepared in the month between classes ending and the DOE internship by absorbing everything I could about the education industry. I reviewed every item in the great EP online resource library that featured more than 40 hours of readings, videos, and news clippings on hot-button education issues. I supplemented this with 10 blogs, 12 email newsletters, 15 books, and other materials I am plowing through in my off time this summer.
The EP program began in early June with a training session featuring a candid and fascinating talk by David Levin, founder of KIPP Charter School. We were then placed in our DOE jobs. My project is to examine how the DOE can improve the content and technology for an online “Promising Practices Library” (PPL) within ARIS. The PPL features videos, narratives, and readings from schools across the city. It is designed to help superintendants and others conduct “Quality Reviews” where they visit and rate NYC public schools.
So far I have visited three public high schools and middle schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn and met with a host of students, principals, teachers, superintendents, and, even briefly, the Chancellor of New York City Schools himself. I look forward to providing useful recommendations to the Knowledge Sharing team I am working with in Accountability this summer.
Journal #2
The summer is flying by. Each day brings new, eye-opening experiences that make me reevaluate my perspectives on education, urban reform, and social entrepreneurship. My internship is also helping me understand how we as business leaders can best use our skills to move this country’s school system forward.
A highlight this month was attending a panel featuring Arne Duncan, US secretary of education, whose frank and insightful take on the urgent nature of education reform was truly inspiring. The 15 or so Education Pioneers working at the DOE this summer were also treated to a one-hour session with Chancellor Joel Klein, where he spoke very openly about the challenges of bringing transformational change to the complex and politicized New York public school system as a former business leader.
Our four Education Pioneers one-day workshops were extremely engaging and informative. A session about the Opportunity Gap featured straight talk among the cohort about delicate subjects like race and economic class. We trekked to Newark for a session on Urban School Districts. A workshop about Human Capital illustrated the challenges teachers face as a marginalized white-collar profession. Another seminar about School Choice illustrated how complicated it is for parents and students to navigate school selection in New York City.
I’ve tried to balance lunches with charter schools sponsored by EP and events that DOE Pioneers have organized (including a fancy restaurant week lunch at Nobu!) with my actual project work. I entered the information-gathering phase of my project this month, interviewing principals and other administrators, analyzing quantitative data on web usage, and creating a survey that we distributed to 350 users of our online Promising Practices Library.
Each day I find new ways to use my Columbia Business School skills. Some weeks I’m utilizing advanced Lookups and Pivot Tables to build analytical reports. Other times I’m evaluating the rapid staff turnover at the DOE through the Zenlens of Professor Jick’s Organizational Change class. Most recently I’ve used concepts from Strategy and Leadership to decide how to synthesize and communicate my recommendations most effectively.
Journal #3
The home stretch of my project placement ended up being the busiest. I spent several weeks transforming the massive amount of data I collected (100+ pieces of background research, 10 interviews, survey results, quantitative online usage data, benchmarking, etc.) into a set of specific recommendations my team could use to better market the Promising Practices Library, improve its content, and re-organize its web navigation.
I walked through my 65 PowerPoint slides (plus appendices!) in a one-hour presentation to 10 team members. The work is already informing goal setting and strategies for the coming year, which is gratifying. In particular, my new data templates and marketing ideas are going to be used to help propel technology usage across the NYC public school community.
I could not have synthesized and effectively presented my materials without the great training I received at Columbia Business School. The practical curriculum helped me structure this complex business problem and prioritize results in a way that ultimately proved actionable for senior managers.
I also continued to get out of the office and see our work in action around New York City. My team sent me to an inspiring student-sponsored Farmer’s Market in the Bronx. I attended my last Education Pioneers events, which included a final session on “Out-of-School Time” — a networking “Showcase” at a Brooklyn loft with all our partner organizations — and a final “Capstone” day at the beach in New Jersey where the 60 NYC fellows could reflect on our summers and begin thinking about how we can impact education going forward.
This summer would not have been possible without Education Pioneers and the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Summer Fellowship. I’m proud to attend a business school where students value giving back to their communities and translating private sector skills into public impact. I look forward to starting my second year.
