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Author Archives: schooldog
Schools and Bureaucracy and Some Politics: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part D
Summary: Referring back to last week’s post, a plan to provide study time in our school served as a promising example of the incremental changes needed to further reform in schools. The story is here continued. On what seemed to … Continue reading
Schools and Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part C
Summary: A program to provide extra help to struggling students in one school shows the potential inherent in staff/administration cooperative planning. Among the casualties of recession driven budget cuts in our school was the after school activity bus, admittedly a … Continue reading
Schools and Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does — Part B
Summary: A fledgling initiative in Washington State with exceeding promise nonetheless demonstrates the pitfalls of hierarchical directives. Politicians talk about the rising gap between the rich and the poor, the upper economic classes and the lower economic classes. In Washington … Continue reading
Schools Bureaucracy: Empower Your People; Chrysler Does (Part A)
The next few posts will compare one example of a recent American corporate success that has valued the creative and cognitive input of workers and staff with two organizational episodes taken from my school experience. The first of these school … Continue reading
Schools and Culture: Kid Failure and Adult Voice
Summary: In a national culture that often infantilizes too many young people, how do we in schools create an environment that counters this characteristic of the prevailing culture, and in the process essentially grow in our charges the personal and … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: We Now Learn Good Teachers Are Valuable
Summary: Another in a string of commentary about flattening the school hierarchy, and the value of teacher and staff input to decision making. Age old is the tale of the teacher, from the wise one, to the prophet, to the … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: The Flattening of Structure: Muda, Muri, and Mura
Building on last week’s introduction to the history of the Toyota revival following the Second World War, and its use of the thinking of Edward Deming, this post explores some of the managerial concepts that have been key ingredients to … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: The Flattening of Structure — Deming, Toyota, and Lean Management
Summary: A look at management philosophies from the corporate world that encourage worker input. So it is the New Year, and we are back in our traces. Vacation in the Florida sun still warms the Northwest gloom to which we’ve … Continue reading
Schools and Culture: Hope in Small Things
The heavy and long days of winter have descended in this Northern climate, and so too does the school year begin to lose the freshness of the new fall school year, and begin the long slog through winter darkness toward … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: The Google Testimony
For some weeks now, I have tired of repetition of stories about the rigidities of school bureaucracies, and have been hankering to explore what I think are promising avenues to combat and reform the power structure. To do so, I’m … Continue reading
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