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Tag Archives: empowering teachers
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: 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 — 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
Schools and Politics: Reflections on the Occupy Movement and Teachers
Intuitively the conditions of economic imbalance that have spawned the Occupy movement and the condition of school bureaucratic inertia have similarities worth taking a look at. Currently both systems, our schools and our economy as a whole, are dysfunctional, or … 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
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