Articles
Most education dollars in Illinois are paid out under contracts negotiated in secret. To improve public education, the same openness rules American expect of open participatory democracy needs to be applied to smoke-filled backroom board-union negotiations.
Psychotherapist Cara Naiman highlights the importance of attachment in children’s lives.
The air quality in China is bad enough you should take notice. It’s not bad enough you should avoid visiting and taking a good look at differences between China’s Tiger Moms and America’s Wall Street tycoons.
The reaction when John proposed tying instruction to assessment in more than one classroom was surprising, especially because he was in China.
What jobs will tomorrow’s children have? I informally surveyed a number of teens and adults from around the world, and responses told the same fearful story. Technology, robots and artificial intelligence will take jobs. Educators plan for science fiction futures.
Street sweepers in Shanghai offer a hint at the economics of China’s job market. The average income in Shanghai is under $15,000 per year. Street sweepers make less than that.
If you haven’t been to China recently, you haven’t seen its sparkling streets. After a long stint in Shanghai, I recently visited Suzhou and Hong Kong. Suzhou is a 20-minute high speed rail ride from central Shanghai. No potholes. No garbage. No oil stains. I don’t remember even seeing any gum spots. For a city of 10 million, Suzhou is new, clean and spotless, just like most of Shanghai.
On opening day every year, school heads spend more time recounting success stories than charting statistical successes. Data retreats, all the rage a decade ago, have disappeared from the landscape. Why despite being flush with data do school leaders prefer to tell stories to open the year?
Paris has some great schools. An American friend of mine lives near the Bastille with her French husband and two primary school-aged kids. She likes her kids’ school. But she still wants to move her family back to the US when they get to high school.
Public and private sector leadership development remains divided, especially in formal degree programs. Creating transformed schools necessitates bridging the bifurcation. An immediate solution is signing up more would-be education leaders to great MBA programs.
The two greatest impediments to transforming education come from the public. Public opinion needs to change in two areas to open the floodgates and radically improve schooling for children. The public needs to embrace the idea that the schools of the future will not look like the schools of the past, and the economics of education need to escape partisan politics.
The Illinois pension crisis is only part of the story. Funding for Illinois schools affects students profoundly.
School leaders in the next few years are going to face seismic disruptions in every aspect of teaching and learning. Before accepting a leadership position, the mindful leader needs to gauge the likelihood the school will absorb disruptions or be permanently disrupted by technological change.
People come together to provide each other support and take advantage of collective strengths. High-performing teams start with the same premises.
Workers dislike teams for many reasons. Teammates are often assigned, not chosen. Teams work in meetings, and ineffective meetings mean wasted work time. But there is hope.
Team success is organizational success. Capacity to build and deploy effective teams has repeatedly been shown to be more important than individual skill, procedural clarity or even well-defined performance targets in improving organizational outcomes.
If opening the US to international entrepreneurs is the solution to economic growth, what does it mean for innovation in education?
Before considering whether to leave teaching and take a role in the administration, teachers need to learn an important lesson about indemnification.
When children were given a computer, they self-organized learning groups and reinforced the central tenet of education. We all need more memory and faster processors.
Public education in the United States resists change. That schools look much now as they did in the 1950s and the entrenched interests that resist change is old news. The story less often told and much more provocative is how gatekeeping to school heads hinders change.
