Featured Alumni

Jacob Mnookin - 2007 BES Fellow - Founder, Coney Island Prep - Brooklyn, NY

Fellowship Year: 2007
Title: Executive Director, Coney Island Preparatory Public Charter School
Enrollment: 382 students
Authorizer: New York City Department of Education
School Opening: August 24, 2009
Grades: 5-12
Education: Princeton University, Master’s in Public Affairs/Urban and Regional Planning; Middlebury College

Q&A with Jacob

What did your path to school leadership look like? What skills did you acquire at each step of your
career?

I taught high school English for three years. Eventually, the failures of an inner-city school system became too much for me to bear. I decided to go to graduate school for education policy, get a job in state government, and effect change on a more macro level. Once at graduate school, however, I realized that path wasn’t for me. I missed teaching more than I imagined I would. I decided that school leadership was a great way to marry my desire to effect change on a larger scale, with the understanding that I was happiest professionally when I was around students.

Public policy school was a great step towards school leadership because it is an interdisciplinary degree and education reform is incredibly politicized. In addition, the program I went to was heavily quantitative in focus, which was a skill set I lacked, but which is important as more and more schools move towards a data-driven instruction approach. I recognized that if I wanted to be a successful school leader, I would still have to address some serious skill deficits. I looked into various school leadership programs, and found Building Excellent Schools to be the best fit for me. Building Excellent Schools promotes a two-leader model, where one leader focuses primarily on teaching and learning, and a second leader focuses more on the business and operational aspects of a school. I was much more interested in the business and operational side of things, and Building Excellent Schools is one of the few leadership training programs that focuses quite heavily on that. I entered the program in the fall of 2007 and just finished my Fellowship year. It is amazing to look back and think of all that I have learned and all that I have accomplished.

Give us a quick sketch of a day in the life of a school leader.

Coney Island Prep has not yet opened (we plan to open in August 2009 with 80 fifth-grade students), and right now I am the only person working full-time on the project. As a result, in a lot of ways, if there is work to be done, I need to do it. That can be very overwhelming, but it is also what I find most exciting about the work. Some days I need to be a lawyer. Other days I need to be an accountant. Some days I need to be a community activist. Other days I need to be a curriculum writer. Some days I need to be a designer and public relations and marketing guru. Other days I need to be a human resources specialist. There’s always a new challenge, and no two days look the same.