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Tag Archives: administrative style
School Reform: Yes, There Is Some Good News!
Summary: School reform is a long and often discouraging slog. This is a pause to celebrate the many hopeful events and trends that together refresh for the next round. It is time to celebrate positives in the many headed effort … Continue reading
School Reform: Teacher Entrepreneurs Need Not Apply
Summary: Innovation and entrepreneurship by teachers tend to be dead on arrival because of a broader school culture which favors hierarchical directives. How are teachers to be established as the cornerstone player in a decentralized school culture, as I argue … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform
Tagged administrative style, communication in schools, empowering teachers, entrepreneurship and teachers, flat oranizations, innovation in schools, school administrator training, school reform, teacher morale, teacher motivation, teacher professionalism
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School Reform: Yes, Put the Principal in Charge, But That Ain’t All
Summary: Moves to give principals the authority to determine who will work in the school building for which they are responsible make sense, but to do so is but one of several interlocking changes that need to proceed together. One … Continue reading
School Reform: The Education of a Reformer
Summary: In an echo of assertions in recent posts that school district leaders need to listen deeply into the ranks in their effort to reform failing schools, we take a look at the current arrival point of the career of … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform, Schools and Politics
Tagged administrative style, communication in schools, empowering teachers, flat oranizations, Michelle Rhee, relationships in schools, school leadership, school reform, StudentsFirst, superintendent style, teachers' unions
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Schools, Bureaucracy, and Politics: Parent Power and Teacher Professionalism
Summary: Restiveness by parents in Los Angeles and teachers in Seattle reflects the tendency of educational bureaucracies to ignore voices from the grass roots level. Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles is poster child to the desperate academic struggle in … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, School Reform, Schools and Politics
Tagged administrative style, at risk students, communication in schools, Crenshaw High School, empowering teachers, Garfield High School teacher boycott, low-income students, MAP testing, parent power, school reform, teacher morale, teacher professionalism
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Schools and Politics: Bargained Success in the New Haven Schools
Summary: A reflection on Nicholas Kristof’s recent column “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”. He leaves out a critical element. In his column, “Uniting to Oust Failing Teachers”, as published in the Seattle Times February 18, 2012, the peripatetic Nicholas Kristof … 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
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
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