Tag: parents

This past Sunday, Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania, wrote an interesting opinion piece for The Washington Post. This past June, Interstate 95 – one of the nation’s busiest highways – collapsed in Philadelphia. The highway reopened in 12 days. When asked how that was accomplished, Governor Shapiro offered four reasons: Empower strong leadership. Speed up…

I’ve written about Caroline Pratt before. Pratt was the principal of City and Country School, a play-based campus located in New York City. She also wrote a seminal book titled “I Learn From Children.” Look it up and read it this summer. When we launched our personalized learning lab school in the Houston Museum District…

Before I started writing this column, I helped launch The Education Game with a Houstonian committed to changing the way kids learn moving forward. The Education Game’s theory of action was to educate parents about how most public schools were providing a sub-par learning experience for most children, including their own. Once these parents became…

In late June, Alec MacGillis, a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote an article highlighting the difficulties the Richmond, Virginia school district was having getting their students back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic. MacGillis writes, “Richmond is a particularly stark example of what education researchers say is nationwide crisis. Student learning across the…

A Little About A Lot When are we going to get serious about giving learning leaders the power to do what’s right for their learners? An article this week in EducationWeek online listed the following demands from classroom teachers for a better professional life, beyond the professional pay due but sadly absent all these years:…

Why is there so much mental and emotional trauma inside our traditional public school system these days? Why have so many kids lost their purpose, and spend their days roaming schools like zombies in a post-apocalyptic world? Are we working on the right things with our kids, or is our curriculum so outdated that even…

Recently, Rebecca Midles wrote an article for Getting Smart online, highlighting the Tacoma, Washington school district for their efforts in expanding the number of choice schools for their students and families to attend. Midles writes, “Tacoma, Washington is home to a growing number of choice schools that offer personalized learning opportunities for its students, reflecting…

I’m back at the keyboard. I hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable 4th of July. For years now, there has been a misunderstanding throughout our public school system that somehow there were policies, primarily enacted by state legislatures, that prevented the traditional school leadership across our country from inventing a better system of learning…

A Little About a Lot Understanding Your Learners When it comes to personality and leadership inventories, I’ve taken my fair share of them. When I was a public school leader, some of the data was helpful as we considered who worked best on teams established to take care of our students while pushing them toward…