The key challenges facing school district leaders charged with improving the quality of their schools is creating the demand and will for systemic change, and then creating the capacity to faithfully execute that change. That was the message emphasized by Mike Miles at the latest Hot Lunch speaker series put on by the Donnell-Kay Foundation. Miles is the [...]
A DC policy wonk tries to find quality diverse schools for his kids and writes a book about it. With podcast
Podcast: Listen to what Adam Rubin, co-founder of 2Revolutions education design firm, has to say about envisioning schools of the future. He spoke Friday at the Donnell-Kay Foundation’s Hot Lunch series.
Toyota’s Dennis Parker and Cathy Lund of Project Lead the Way talk about their partnership to produce work-ready graduates with specific skills.
A teacher who can’t read? John Corcoran says he taught for 17 years before learning to read at age 48. Hear his story.
Working with kids is the easy part of education reform; working with adults is the challenge, says charter school advocate Eva Moskowitz.
The Broad Center’s Becca Bracy Knight discusses the center’s work developing talent to run school systems in this season’s final Hot Lunch podcast.
Peg Hoey describes Kunskapsskolan Education, an international school model based in Sweden and now in the U.S. Podcast.
This article was written by Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He spoke at the Feb. 10 “Hot Lunch” event in Denver.
Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look—Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever—scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to “push the ball forward.” Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives?
The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: “The opposition of special interests.” Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously.
That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It’s not that the wrong people are in charge. It’s that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.
We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet, in fact, nearly every major decision affecting the education of our children is shaped (and misshaped) by at least four separate levels of governance: Washington, the state capitol, the local district, and the individual school building itself.
Shannon Fitzgerald, director of choice and enrollment for Denver Public Schools, talks about the district’s new enrollment system
