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Category Archives: Schools and Culture
Schools and Culture: The Wearing Down of Teacher, Part B
Summary: Last post I reacted to news that 46% of teachers leave the profession in their first five years, and suggested some of the reason has to do with ills in the culture, ills that create students too little connected … Continue reading
Schools and Culture: The Wearing Down of Teacher
Summary: 46% of American teachers quit the profession within their first five years; what role does contemporary culture and the characteristics of the kids it turns out play in this appalling statistic? Recently I read with astonishment a reference in … Continue reading
Schools, Culture, and Politics: David Brooks’ “The Widening Opportunity Gap”, and Washington State’s College Bound Scholar Program.
Summary: Can incentive scholarship programs such as Washington State’s College Bound Scholar impact the growing economic gap between low and upper income groups, and reestablish mobility into the middle class? How refreshing it is to find a conservative who laments … Continue reading
School Culture: Comparative Life in Another Helping Profession
Summary: Your faithful blogger experiences parallels between the professional life of teachers and that of nurses. As life happens, I have just returned from a stay in the hospital following surgery. As we shall see, the timing fortuitously was on … Continue reading
School Culture and Politics: Whither the Money?
Summary: A conundrum, in which school reform will depend on application of public funds toward targeted solutions that remain elusive in a political environment highly resistive to new spending. I am a professional person. I strive to define my job … 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
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
Schools and Culture: Basic Skills and the Global Economy
Summary: Though we may be making grudging progress on the basic skills of reading, writing, and math, a recent article by Thomas Friedman begs the question, when we will finally be proficient in those basic skills areas, will the train … Continue reading
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