What Type of Superinendent Do You Need?
Like a chess grandmaster, The Fixer superintendent always is several steps ahead of everyone in the room and has a bias for action. The alternative to The Fixer is The Multiplier. The Multiplier superintendent is willing to share intellectual and emotional ownership of new strategies with teachers and administrators.
September 2010
Find Out What Your Public Wants
In a democracy, people are entitled to their opinions. They are not, however, entitled to their own facts. Here are some practical guidelines for board members in evaluating competing claims for what the public really wants from our educational system.
August 2010
Focusing on Leadership Essentials
Now, more than ever, leaders must focus on the essentials, the core strategies that have the greatest impact on student learning and educational equity. Abundant evidence suggests that a few strategies have a disproportionately large impact on education. The “big six” are feedback, efficacy, time, nonfiction writing, formative assessment, and expectations.
July 2010
Early College Program Saves Parents Money
As tight as school budgets are around the nation, family budgets often are strained even more, particularly when parents are looking at the costs of college. But at Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township in Indianapolis, Ind., students can earn two years of college credit at no cost to parents.
June 2010
Performance Pay Is Coming
Performance pay is coming. We offer five practical ideas to make pay for performance work: evaluate teachers not on data alone, but also on their response to data; use a transparent and objective system of evaluation; honor your contracts; assess leaders and policymakers, not just teachers; and, avoid unintended consequences.
May 2010
Making Teachers More Effective
The Gates Foundation has committed $100 million over seven years to help Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools dramatically strengthen teacher effectiveness. It’s an exciting and ambitious project that also has involved the board from the get-go.
May 2010
Successful School Reform
Why do some school reform efforts work when others don’t? We identified six features of early success, key ingredients for any district’s reform recipe. They are: suitability, superintendent leadership, reform champions, retaining focus, advancing through stages, and communications. Including the six key ingredients will help ensure your reform’s success.
May 2010
Open School Board Meetings
In the past decade, with the explosive growth of e-mail and texting, school board members have more opportunities than ever to run afoul of their state’s open meeting law. A walking quorum (staggered meeting) can take place by e-mail, where such “meetings” can occur in minutes – possibly violating state law.
May 2010
Grading Your Leaders
Evaluating the superintendent is one of the most important jobs of school boards. Unfortunately, this essential task is frequently flawed. In a national study I conducted of more than 300 evaluations, I found that the higher the administrator ranked, the more likely it was that evaluations were ambiguous, politicized, and rendered too late to improve leadership performance.
April 2010
Professional Development
Does this professional development scenario sound familiar? A teacher attends a professional development session. Unfortunately, there’s no time to meet with her colleagues to work out the kinks. Over time, strategies from the session are forgotten and no real change occurs. But what if the scenario unfolded this way? …
April 2010
Using Technology to Connect
Teachers, students, and parents are all using social media to stay connected. Most school board members, however, have been slow to embrace this new medium. You need to be aware of this disconnect and integrate this powerful communications tool into your governing life. If you don’t, you are missing an opportunity.
April 2010
A Steep Decline
The “good” news on state budgets is that it could have been worse: The federal stimulus package kept many states and school districts from falling off a financial cliff, as programs and personnel were spared. The “bad” news is that, as stimulus funds are rapidly spent, the cliff is approaching again.
April 2010
Growing Leaders
Too often, what passes for leadership development at the district level has been nothing more than an assortment of unaligned and ineffective activities. Yet many school districts persist in this haphazard approach to leadership development. This is puzzling, as there has never been a more critical need for school administrators.
April 2010
Your Leadership Partners
Perhaps the most overlooked participants in the debate over school reform are the 53 state and territory school board associations in the United States. Every school board association, no matter how big or small, has a significant legislative presence in its state capitol. Their member districts provide a powerful grassroots base of support.
April 2010
Anne Bryant and Dan Domenech Talk Leadership
What follows is an exclusive interview with NSBA Executive Director Anne L. Bryant and AASA Executive Director Daniel Domenech. It is also a snapshot of the conversations and collaborations that regularly occur between the pair.
April 2010
School Boards:What Does The Future Hold?
These days, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see the challenges facing school boards in the years ahead. More mandates are on the way. More charter schools are on the horizon. And everyone will expect school boards to keep raising achievement despite gut-wrenching cuts in state education funding.
April 2010
Understanding Special Education Terms
Special education terms and jargon can be quite confusing to school board members, especially those new to their role. To help board members understand special education jargon we have provided and defined a list of relevant terms and acronyms, “The ABCs of Special Ed.”
March 2010
Changing the Grade
A revolution is occurring in Adams County School District 50. If it succeeds, the district will overturn a public school icon: the grade level. Starting this year, elementary and middle school students are being grouped by level, not age, and the reform moves to the high school next year.
March 2010
Helping Employees Cope With Stress
Educational leaders can do three things, none of which costs money, to help address employee stress: They can make better decisions about the use of time, ensure that employees get the mental health care necessary to deal with stress, and communicate clearly and consistently with every stakeholder in the community.
March 2010
Growing Through Adversity
Elkhart, Ind., once was known as the nation’s recreational vehicle capital, manufacturing RVs by the thousands. In recent years, however, the town has had one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. Student achievement languished, and as the economy grew worse, many expected student results to plummet. Instead, the opposite happened.
February 2010
Q and A with Rod Paige
Buses, lunch counters, swimming pools, and drinking fountains were the battlegrounds of the ‘60s-era civil rights movement. Today, according to former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige, that battleground is the classroom -- a place where too many African-American students are failing to achieve their potential.
February 2010
The Profession of Governing
Upon entering school board service, most of us are anxious to learn all we can about education and management. When we stand for election, we highlight experience in education and management, and voters believe we are better prepared because of that background. This all seems quite logical. It is also quite wrong.
February 2010
What Can Schools Learn from Business?
If school boards want to improve their schools, then all they need to do is to model the business practices of Corporate America. There’s no escaping this simplistic formula for school reform. As with most panaceas, there’s a fair bit of truth -- and no little rubbish -- in such thinking.
February 2010
Getting Support from Employers for School Leaders
It’s hard for any professional to juggle board duties with the ever-increasing demands of today’s jobs. And while it appears the vast majority of employers don’t mind and may even actively encourage employees to volunteer for public service, some make the lives of school board members anything but easy.
February 2010
How School Leaders Cope with Stress
Maybe it was the federal stimulus funds, a slowdown in job losses, or an uptick in the stock market that has lightened the mood in the country. But, as analysts have warned, the United States isn’t in the clear yet. No one knows this better than the three educators profiled here.
February 2010