Paul Reville, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education Founder – Education Redesign Lab speaks during Poverty Matters: Making the Case for a System Overhaul at the Harvard Graduate School of Education inside Askwith Hall. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Professor Paul Reville organize a series of nationwide meetings to address how high-quality educational opportunities can be experienced by students other than those in affluent neighborhoods. The solution? Community involvement, as teachers and principals cannot be solely responsible for any turnaround.
This article, posted by NPR‘s Morning Edition, provides insight into the current economic state of American education, with historical origins, and perspectives between low-income and affluent communities and school districts. It began with a question: “How do we pay for our schools?”
Today, our school funding system is infinitely more complex, but still based on that one, powerful idea — that education is a public good, and paying for it could be considered a public obligation.
Source: Education Week, U.S. Census Bureau. Credit: Alyson Hurt and Katie Park/NPR
A long and significant read on how the United States Government bureaucracy reflexively inhibits change — in this case technology efficiencies — and how small reform victories cascade to larger initiatives. The article, by Steven Levy, is instructive on how organizations can always aspire to provide better service, better outcomes. How this ‘Rebel Alliance’ counts immediate, small victories as essential in proving worth are also essentials steps for consensus building. It’s good storytelling too, with villains and heroes, tensions, and graceful arcs.
Star Spangled Geeks
To the dismay of government contractors, the United States Digital Service is gloriously hacking away in the VA and the Pentagon.
How one company emphasizes team over individual rewards to foster increased collaboration and higher organizational output.
Most leaders reward individual performance and then wonder why teamwork is sorely lacking. In contrast, learn how Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan takes the opposite approach. His “no heroes” strategy has helped foster something far more powerful. See for yourself.
When a British Prime Minister sold out Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Winston Churchill acidly said words to the effect that he had been forced to choose between war and shame.
“He’s chosen shame now; he’ll get war later,” he said.
In Lansing this week, the Michigan Legislature had the choice between a plan that would actually give the Detroit schools a chance to revive, or selling out to the charter school lobby, which wants no restraints on terrible charter schools.
After a day of thinking about it, they unhesitatingly chose shame.
