For three decades now, the course of action has been to accept the system as it stands and to push its schools and teachers to deliver ‘better performance’. Perhaps not surprisingly, that effort to get an inert system to do-better has not proved an outstanding success. The theory of action should instead be to turn public education into a self-improving system.
Much of the discussion about 'what's working' suggests that students learn because the school is district, charter, parochial or whatever. This is bizarre. Clearly, students learn from what goes on in the school; from its curriculum, pedagogy, materials and teachers. This report begins to sketch a taxonomy that gets at these more meaningful school properties.
A description of areas of autonomy, assembled while consulting literature and visiting schools during the writing of the book Trusting Teachers with School Success. And, examples of how schools have used those autonomies.
A big district like Minneapolis has dozens of schools, and all of them could be innovating. That is, in fact, the strategic plan. But the big brain — the central office — gets in the way. How might the state usefully intervene? A Sunday Commentary for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
In November, 2014 the U.S. Department of Education proposed a set of priorities, requirements, and criteria for the federal charter grants to state education agencies. Here is the response of three senior E|E associates, to that proposal.
All known teacher-powered (i.e. teacher-led) schools, both in list form and plotted as pins on a map. A resource of the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative.
A back page Education Week commentary from September 2014 in which Ted Kolderie asks: why don't we get education changing the way successful systems change?
To get innovation in K-12 we need to free those closest to the action—the teachers—to innovate and meet the needs of their students. Ted Kolderie draws lessons from World War 2 to make this argument, in a commentary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
