Category Archives: Leadership

Don’t Believe the Hype (About College)

Monday, April 25th, 2011 at 11:34 am

It’s not what you think.

I’m a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin (and two graduate schools). I loved college. And it’s undeniable that the United States boasts some of the best universities in the world.

I’m also someone who flunked out my freshman year with a 0.6 GPA. In fact, I’d say it wasn’t until I flunked out that I had a chance of being successful. I simply wasn’t ready for what college was designed to give me (aside from the unsupervised social time).

Although my freshman-year GPA was surprisingly low, my freshman-year experience is unsurprisingly common. Too many young people simply aren’t ready for college, for a variety of reasons – meaning they either coast through four or five years and waste a ton of money along the way, or, if they’re lucky, they crash and burn so badly that they discover, for the first time, what it is they actually want to do with their lives – as opposed to what the adults in their lives have told them they should do.

Categories: Democracy, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: college, Ellwood Cubberly, Frederick Taylor, Learning, Matthew Crawford, Scientific Management, Shop Class as Soulcraft, University of Wisconsin, WALL-E

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What’s Your Declaration of Education?

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 11:20 am

Those pesky EduCon folks are at it again.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a small, networked, eclectic tribe of educators who attended a conference at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and who, with great energy and determination, pledged their shared commitment to bring about a different type of public school system by agreeing to the following core values:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members.
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen.
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate.
5. Learning can — and must — be networked.

Categories: Democracy, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: best questions, Core Values, Declarations of Education, EduCon, EduTribes, Learning, Science Leadership Academy, The Great American Teach-In

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What If Learning — Not Fighting — Were the Focus?

Monday, April 11th, 2011 at 9:44 am

As accusations fly back and forth over the reported DC cheating scandal – the latest in a series of battles between America’s two dominant Edu-Tribes – I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we stopped spending so much time focusing on what is broken or who is to blame, and started focusing instead on how people learn, and how we can create better learning environments for everyone?

Categories: Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: Edu-Tribes, Events, Faces of Learning, kim carter, Labor Law, Learner Sketch, Learning, michelle rhee, movement, QED Foundation, stories, waiting for superman, Wisconsin

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What’s the Deal with Smaller Classrooms?

Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 2:00 pm

There’s an Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post by Eva Moskowitz, the successful edu-preneur of the Success Charter Network in New York City, about the overall value of having smaller or larger classrooms. And, true to type, it’s a piece with numerous useful insights about the bottom-line business of crafting successful schools — and precious little about the foundational human element that undergirds any truly transformational place to work and learn.

Categories: Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: class size, education reform, Eva Moskowitz, Reformers, washington post

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What Joel Klein Doesn’t Understand About Teaching — and What We Should Do Instead

Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 11:57 am

In case you missed it, former NYC Schools Chief Joel Klein had an Op-Ed in this weekend’s Washington Post in which he, rightly, urges us to do what it takes to establish a true long-term teaching profession. His recipe for doing so, however, reveals the extent to which he has misdiagnosed both the problem and its potential solutions.

Categories: Assessment, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change, Teacher Quality

Tags: Assessment, education policy, ESEA, evaluation, federal education policy, forum for education & democracy, joel klein, Learning, NCLB, policies, teacher quality, teaching

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NYC Innovation Tour

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 10:03 am

Those of you living in the NYC area have a cool opportunity worth taking advantage of this coming April. IDEA, aka the Institute for Democratic Education in America, is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure that all young people can engaged meaningfully with their education and gain the tools to build a [...]

Categories: Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: Calhoun School, Democracy, democratic learning communities, experiential, IDEA, innovation, iSchool, Kirsten Olson, Learning, NYC, Scott Nine, The Green School, Urban Academy

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The Wisconsin Teachers Protest: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 2:04 pm

As school systems across the state of Wisconsin cancel another day of classes – the result of massive protests in Madison following Governor Scott Walker’s effort to strip educators of the bulk of their collective bargaining rights — I can’t help but think of the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Continue [...]

Categories: Democracy, First Amendment, Leadership, Organizational Change

Tags: cesar chavez, collective bargaining, collective capacity, Labor, teachers, teachers unions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, UN Declaration of Human Rights, Unions, Wisconsin

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Let’s End the Battle of the Edu-Tribes

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 11:20 am

There’s a revolution underway – and no, I don’t mean in Egypt or Tunisia.

I mean the growing, hopeful, tech-savvy, solution-oriented tribe of educators who attended last weekend’s EduCon 2.3 in Philadelphia, an annual event that bills itself as “both a conversation and a conference, ” and a place where people come together, “both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools.”

Categories: Democracy, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change

Tags: education reform, EduCon, federal education policy, NCLB, obama, Science Leadership Academy, status quo, tribal leadership, tribes

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To Honor King, Embody Our Ideals

Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 6:41 am

Today, Americans will pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and — to the delight of students and adults alike — a national holiday. Yet few if any Americans, at this crucial time in our nation’s history, will directly connect King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in — and use of — our primary tools of democracy, the five freedoms of the First Amendment.

Categories: Democracy, First Amendment, Leadership

Tags: Democracy, first amendent, freedom, freedom of speech, martin luther king

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Education Inception

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at 12:13 pm

I just watched Christopher Nolan’s remarkable new movie Inception, a futuristic film about a group of people who, through a variety of means, plant a thought so deeply in the mind of one man that it grows naturally and becomes seen as his own. In the opening scene of the movie, protagonist Peter Cobb rhetorically asks the audience: “What’s the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? No. An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea’s taken hold in the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A person can cover it up, or ignore it – but it stays there.”

Cobb’s movie-based challenge is not unlike the reality-based one being faced by today’s advocates for public education reform – how to seed an idea so simple and powerful that it can mobilize public opinion, inspire policymakers, and improve the overall learning conditions for children. And yet after reading Michelle Rhee’s two newest efforts to launch her own form of “inception” – an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal and her organization’s inaugural policy agenda – I see further evidence of both her well-intentioned vision for massive educational reform, and her fundamental misunderstanding about the power of ideas.

Categories: Democracy, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Change, Voice

Tags: inception, Learning, michelle rhee, mobilization, students first

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