Another tall education-reform tree fell the other day when Lou Gerstner passed away. The super-chief of IBM and overall business savant also spearheaded a memorable era when corporate tycoons, governors, leading educators—and U.S. presidents—joined together to get stuff done in the K–12 realm.
The product of education-minded parents, a Catholic high school, Dartmouth College, and Harvard Business School, Gerstner was most visible to me as chair of the Achieve board from 1996 to 2002, a remarkable and much missed powerhouse organization in the ed-reform world, ably run by Bob Schwartz, Mike Cohen, and other key players. So I’m recalling mainly the Clinton-into-Bush 43 era, roughly paralleling the late Jim Hunt’s second round as the reform leader of North Carolina and dovetailing the late Rod Paige’s time as Houston superintendent followed by U.S. secretary of education.
Not many trees are growing that tall nowadays, unfortunately, definitely not in the groves we can point to. (Still with us from those older groves, of course, are Bill Clinton, Dick Riley, Lamar Alexander, and others, including Bush, as well as such gubernatorial eminences as Roy Romer and Bob Taft, but they’re no longer in leadership roles.)
My clearest memories of Gerstner commanding the troops is a pair of convenings (under Achieve auspices) in the big and then-grand IBM conference facility on the New York Palisades that pulled together almost all the governors, pretty much the entire reform portion of the country’s education leadership, other major CEOs, and the President of the United States. These were serious gatherings that both diagnosed the current status of K–12 performance and developed strategies for strengthening it. But at least as important as what was said was the pervasive sense that “we gotta work on this together, across sectors, across parties, without regard for our organizational obligations.”
That’s leadership. That was Gerstner in action. But he didn’t stop there. No doubt he was also selling computers, but he launched IBM’s “reinventing education” program (ably led by Stan Litow), and he went on to catalyze and chair an important commission on the teaching profession, while serving on every board you can think of. He also wrote a pretty good book with my friend the late Denis Doyle.
If you query AI about “Lou Gerstner education reform,” the answer comes back under these exactly appropriate headings: national standards; performance-driven system; technology integration; teacher quality; and business leadership in schools.”
Those remain high on my list (along with quality school choice), but a lot of folks aren’t buying things like national standards in our fragmented and more politicized age. So be it. What’s worse is the shortage of commanding reform leaders bent on getting stuff done and ensuring that American kids from all sorts of backgrounds learn a whole lot more.
Thanks for showing how it can be done, Lou, and may you rest in peace.
