November 2004

Educational Reformer Anthony Bryk Joins School Faculty

Anthony Bryk, whose research has informed major school reform in Chicago and elsewhere, joined the Business School faculty in September. An expert in school organization, accountability, assessment, and educational statistics, he is the Spencer Professor of Education and of Organizational Behavior at the Business School and in the School of Education. He has an office in each school and teaches courses pertaining to the joint MBA/MA degree program of the two schools.

Bryk came to Stanford from the University of Chicago, where he was known formally as the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Sociology, and informally to Chicago newspapers and educators as the leader of the “Hyde Park mafia” of school reform. That’s because the university is in the Hyde Park neighborhood, where in 1988, Bryk founded the university’s Center for School Improvement. As director, his goal was to produce people who would “bubble up to leadership positions” in the nation’s third largest public school system. Currently, one of his former students is second in command.

Bryk also created the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a federation of Chicago-area research organizations whose goal is to put pressure on those same leaders by producing research that determines which reforms work and which don’t. The consortium, for instance, released a study last April demonstrating that Chicago’s three-year-old policy of holding back thousands of students to repeat a grade had not helped them. Social promotion also does not work, the consortium said, based on careful comparisons. “The real solution is an acceleration strategy in the pre-primary and primary years so that all students are reading by grade three,” Bryk said in an interview for this magazine.

Business School Dean Robert Joss credited “the genuine partnership between business and education” with persuading Bryk to relocate to Stanford. “He was convinced that he’ll be able to do even greater things at Stanford and with its extended network.”

An organizational sociologist who earned his doctorate in educational statistics at Harvard, Bryk said he hopes to work with colleagues, alumni/ae, and students of the Business School who are interested in organizational enhancement. “Many of the core problems of school improvement are really organizational—how to develop better human resources, the startup of new charter management organizations, and the strategic redesign of complex bureaucracies,” he said. “These are problems that have been confronted in the private sector, and I hope to help bridge the divide between the two.”

Bryk is also known to scholars for his development of data analysis methods that are used in fields ranging from education to epidemiology. While at Harvard, he and Steve Raudenbush, now of the University of Michigan, developed models for better data analysis in what they call “nested structures”—situations where one level of analysis cannot be completely divorced from another, such as children nested in classrooms nested in schools, or workers within firms within industries.

Among K–12 educators, Bryk is known more for the results he obtains than for the methods he uses. He has coauthored many reports and books, including Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Harvard, 1995) and Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).

In 2003, he was awarded the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Scholarship and the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the American Educational Research Association. He is married to Sharon Greenberg, who also has been active in school reform and will be working at Stanford in the School of Education on special projects with Dean Deborah Stipek.

Three faculty members recently published new books. They are The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts, The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment by Michael Ray, and the fourth edition of Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation, coauthored by Robert Burgelman.

The last takes the perspective of the general manager at the product line, business unit, and corporate levels, and addresses the interaction between these levels. About 40 percent of the cases studies included are new with this edition. Burgelman is the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management and director of the Stanford Executive Program.

Ray’s book is based on insights gleaned from 25 years of teaching personal creativity to Business School students. He includes exercises for developing one’s highest goal and examples of alumni/ae who have found theirs and use it to contribute in new ways to their organizations, families, and communities. Ray is the John G. McCoy–Banc One Corp. Professor of Creativity and Innovation and of Marketing, Emeritus.

Roberts looks at firms that are experimenting with new organizational designs, routines, and cultures to improve their performance. He develops frameworks for analyzing the interrelationships and argues that successful organizations go about change in a holistic manner. Roberts is the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management, and International Business and codirector of the School’s Center for Global Business and the Economy.

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Faculty

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Five junior scholars have been added to the Business School’s tenure track this fall. They are Gráinne Fitzsimons, Ilan Guttman, Alan Jagolinzer, Stefan Nagel, and Ilya Strebulaev.

Fitzsimons, an assistant professor of marketing, conducts her primary research into automatic processes in interpersonal relationships and self-regulation. She has shown that different situations can automatically activate different portions of the self-concept and influence subsequent behavior. She received her PhD from New York University last spring.

Guttman and Jagolinzer are both assistant professors of accounting. Guttman’s research interests are in the areas of corporate finance and economics of information. He recently received his doctorate in economics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Jagolinzer, whose doctorate is from Pennsylvania State University, has research interests in empirical financial accounting, especially the interaction among managers of firms and capital markets. Jagolinzer has served more than 10 years as a pilot, pilot instructor, and pilot evaluator in the U.S. Air Force. He is a major in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Nagel and Strebulaev are assistant professors of finance. Nagel pursues research interests in asset pricing, institutional investors, and behavioral finance, and he spent the past year as a lecturer in the Harvard Department of Economics. He received his PhD in finance from London Business School in 2003 and spent the 2001–02 year as a visiting doctoral student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Strebulaev has research interests in the areas of financial auctions, liquidity, and credit risk and capital structure. He received his doctorate in finance from London Business School this spring.

An article titled “The End of Business Schools? Less Success than Meets the Eye,” by Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong, PhD ’03, has received the best paper award for 2002-03 in the journal Academy of Management Learning and Education.

Members of the journal’s editorial board chose the paper, published in its inaugural 2002 issue, as the outstanding paper published in its first six issues. (The paper was summarized in the November 2002 issue of Stanford Business.)

Arguing there is little or no evidence that an MBA degree increased the average recipient’s later earnings, the article subsequently drew a great deal of attention in mass media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 27, 2002), for example, quoted Pfeffer: “It’s been in the wind for a long time, the fact that unless you get an MBA from a really top-notch school, the value is not clear.” Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior. Fong is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington.