William Robinson serves as the Executive Director with the Partnership for Leaders in Education (PLE), a unique joint venture between the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and School of Education and Human Development. The mission of PLE is to significantly raise educational outcomes at the student, school, and system levels, building on the nationally leading capabilities of both Schools. Through executive education and in-the-field support, the PLE advances leadership capacity and insight to help teams create transformational conditions for lasting success. The work focuses particularly on historically underserved populations, and how to build collective leadership capacity amongst school and system teams for what they’re going to do differently to ensure underserved students can thrive. The PLE has worked to date in 32 states, is currently working with 30 different school systems and has many current partners already achieving significantly better student outcomes than pre-COVID levels, bucking national trends.
Robinson discusses the evolution of PLE over the years, what makes the partnership special, his passion for education and more.
Share more about your background and how you came to be in your current role at PLE.
I’ve been with the PLE team at Darden for 13 years and served as the executive director for 10 years now. This organization was doing some of the best executive education in the country for school and system leaders, but there was an opportunity to better connect our experiences to the actual challenges that educational leaders were facing at home, and that we could build a robust system of support around executive education. I was excited about tackling this challenge, and after the progress that we made during the first three years, I was promoted to executive director.
What drew you to work in the field of education?
The “American Dream” that we purport to offer our citizens as a country is often not accessible by a significant portion of our population – particularly those born in poverty, or black, brown and indigenous students. The key to creating the fair and thriving country that we want is a robust education system that meets every single student’s needs. I went to business school hoping to support educational change and to make that dream more accessible for populations that have never had true access. I see school systems across the country doing incredible things and achieving inspiring results, and I want to help amplify and spread that good work across our country as it’s vital to the future of all of our citizens, including my own kids.
What was it about Darden that drew you to the organization?
The challenges facing education are messy, multifaceted and not prone to easy solutions. To confront these messy challenges with ingenuity, this organization truly invests in the best leadership development in the country to help people together solve challenges that have never been solved before and transform our education systems. It can’t be about top-down solutions. Darden is very good about stakeholder engagement and how leaders can co-create solutions with those that we serve. If there was any place well positioned to ignite leaders to address the complexity in education, it’s the PLE, given the assets of Darden complemented by the research and expertise at the UVA School of Education and Human Development.
Everything PLE does is built on a foundation of world-class executive education, and that’s only possible thanks to the incredible faculty that we are able to partner with. They allow us to take the best of Darden, translate it in a way that makes a difference in K-12 transformation, and follow-up in the field to help partners ensure our partners adapt and apply the learning towards what will move the needle in their context.
Getting to invest in these leaders — build their hope, optimism and toolkit, and seeing them leave with new spark, is one of my favorite things to witness.
What would you say makes PLE special?
PLE is focused on collective leadership. How can we get teams that work across silos to collaborate in ways that they have never collaborated before to come up with solutions that have never been attempted?
This year is our 20th anniversary, and for 20 years we have operated with the mindset of never being satisfied with the services that we’re providing and knowing that we can always improve. Even though we’re the only organization in the country that focuses on K-12 leadership development with journal level evidence of success in advancing student learning, we know that the communities we serve deserve the best that we can bring. We continue to improve a best-in-class experience that is a true partnership with our clients, centered on advancing greater student academic outcomes and experiences.
How have you seen the program evolve since you joined 13 years ago?
First, this focus on how do districts and schools work differently together to co-create change is something that’s tremendously more robust now. It was at nascent stages when I joined the organization, and now it’s the center of what we do. We’ve also increased by about four times the intensity of support that we provide to the school systems that we serve.
We have learned a tremendous amount from research and from the partners that we’ve served, so we have a much more robust theory of change and suite of ever-evolving tools to support our partners. Finally, and most importantly, we have an incredible team, many of whom were past partners and have seen how our partnership has ignited transformational results in the communities that we serve.
What is your favorite part about your job?
The leaders that we serve in education are incredibly hardworking, mission-focused and servant-minded. They never get to invest in themselves. Getting to invest in these leaders — build their hope, optimism and toolkit, and seeing them leave with new spark, is one of my favorite things to witness.
