Stories
Stories
Working to improve California's public education system
Katherine Welch (MBA 1988) found her passion in working to improve public education in California. In this video she reviews how she arrived at this personal and civic mission, serving as a board member of the advocacy group Educate Our State.
“I think I use my HBS degree every day, sometimes in obvious and sometimes more subtle ways, both as a connection and as a connector with people who have graduated before me or after me,” she says. “It’s a great network to have, and it’s great that my management skills were developed at the school.
“In the last several years I have spent the bulk of my time working on repairing California’s broken public education system. That’s where I’ve finally found my passion,” Welch says.
“I’ve always been interested in education at some level—as a volunteer and then as a parent. It was when I put my children in public school for a few years several years ago that I realized the depths to which the public education system in California had sunk,” she recalls. “I was working seven or eight hours a week in my community. I had been on the board at a charter school in San Francisco for five years. So I knew somewhat what the financial struggles were. But I’d never actually experienced it firsthand. So what that showed me was that the problem must be statewide if our privileged community couldn’t survive on the funds that we were given. So we realized we needed to build the political will statewide to make the changes that need to happen.
“The focus is that we believe every child in California should have access to a high-quality education,” she says, “and the reason that has not happened is because there is not the political will in Sacramento. Parents and community members are so busy in their silos trying to help their schools and their communities survive that they never unite. So our idea is to have an authentic voice in Sacramento whose only special interest is students.
“I think my experience at HBS—and to be quite frank, just the degree—has given me more confidence and I think it opens more doors. It makes me a more credible voice for what I’m doing, and a more authentic voice in some ways.”
(Published April 2014)
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