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Category Archives: School Bureaucracy
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
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
School Bureaucracy: Teacher Rumblings
Many of my stories of bureaucracy have involved my own experience as a counselor, together with my history as a teacher, though I have ample reason for believing my emotional experience of a school bureaucracy is not unique. Recent rumblings … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: More Tales from the Trenches, Some Retrenchment
Last week I posted a tale in which rigid administrative decisions conflicted with what seemed to be a more flexible idea to give more students a chance to make up credits they had previously failed, and so have a better … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: More Tales From the Trenches
Summary: A simple tale of a credit retrieval plan provides a thematic setting for structure versus flexibility in school decision making. Kids fail classes mostly because they simply do not do the work, and thereby reveal the whole panoply of … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: Hierarchy vs. Collegiality
Summary: Further thoughts on hierarchical versus collegial styles in school administration. Having had time to reflect on my post of 10/10/11, School Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Superintendent Styles, a couple more remarks occur to me. Briefly, in an article in … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy and Bob Marley: Redemption Song
I ride to work this morning. I think about bureaucratic rigidities, this straight jacketing of human responses, the numerous menial indignities and disrespect integral to daily life in schools, not the insults of person to person, but the anonymous slings … Continue reading
School Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Superintendent Styles
I recommend to you an article in the recent June Atlantic magazine written by Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, about his efforts to reform the school system (“Scenes From the Class Struggle”). Mr. Klein … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: Let Us Now Praise on Labor Day
Summary: Around Labor Day, a salute to teachers and their fellow travelers, and a review of the nature of teachers unions, professional or labor, within the current political context. Though past Labor Day, I am belatedly inspired to echo the … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, Schools and Politics
Tagged teachers' unions, teaching, teaching culture
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Teaching/Learning Lexicon: A Paradoxical Implementation
Though my last post, “Teaching/Learning Lexicon: An Introduction”, was some part whimsy and some part semantic history, at my high school the concepts in that last piece are embodied, paradoxically, in a data driven effort by our ninth and tenth … Continue reading
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