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Tag Archives: flat oranizations
School Bureaucracy: Behind the Walkout at Garfield High
Summary: The common practice in school districts that adjusts student-teacher ratios a month into school retards the learning process, distracts teachers and counselors from more important work, and in the end simply harms students, some more than others. The practice … Continue reading
Charter Schools and the Selling of Short Term Teachers
Summary: How is it that young charter teachers achieve results comparable to their more experienced traditional public school brethren, and why do so many in both camps leave teaching so prematurely? Whether or not any charter iteration creates a … 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: 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: A Changed Perspective
Summary: On the cusp of the end of a career in schools and the onset of a blog infested retirement, some meditations on the changed perspective the shift in life imposes. And a plea for stories, please. This summer I … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: Teacher Evaluation Reform
Summary: Top down federal or state mandates have a role, but may also suppress professionalism on the local level. The latter, not good. About the time I wrote my last post urging union and administration alike to find common ground … Continue reading
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
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