Success Academy: Under Fire… again

Success Academy was obviously not happy with this publicity: http://www.nytimes.com/…/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-st…? or this publicity http://www.nytimes.com/…/success-academy-founder-defends-sc… or this: http://www.nytimes.com/…/at-success-academy-charter-schools…. There has been a lot recently. But it is always framed as one teacher or one leader or one school simply not reflecting the network’s values. It’s not clear to me why this excuse is accepted. It is […]

Communities of Character – a response

View image | gettyimages.com I was troubled by David Brooks’ column this weekend about communities of character and the schools that he uses as examples of institutions that intentionally focus on building students’ characters. I also had a conversation on Tuesday with someone who used the term “character-driven” to refer to schools like KIPP, Success […]

Education “Reformers” or Reform Fundamentalists?

Someone asked me exactly who I meant when I used this term, and it’s a fair question.  I intentionally put the phrase in quotes for the purposes of my open letter because it has been used over time by dozens of different groups committed to changing the US education system from whatever happened to be […]

Teacher experience matters

Shocking? Research finds that teachers’ experience level matters When a Colorado task force, the LEAD Compact, was convened in 2013 one of the questions that arose was the issue of teacher quality. A range of experts came in to speak to the group about the research that underlay one of the unspoken assumptions of the […]

Professional insight and parenting

Last fall I had friends over whose son was in the same class as my son at our local Montessori school. They were a bit annoyed at the school and the teacher because they felt that their son was floundering and nothing was being done; they were considering changing schools. Montessori schools are organized into […]

Our biographies as our leadership

In my last post I shared stories of some of the students I interviewed at the MET schools in Providence, RI. What I am finding most interesting about my MET experience is what happens when I tell people about it. It drives home to me the fact that our leadership and our notions of success […]

Business and education

I was at the annual meeting of a local Chamber of Commerce last week and couldn’t help but be struck by the simplistic way in which business leaders talk about education reform. I am frustrated by the double standard adopted by the business community when it comes to shaping and, in many cases, driving education […]

What college prep charters can do

College prep charter school models like KIPP began as middle schools.  The idea was to catch kids before they went to high school and to ensure that they were brought up to levels of proficiency in basic math and literacy.  In other words, these schools focused on academic remediation.  The fastest way to achieve this […]

Separate but equal? (redux)

My 7-year old son just started at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning (RMSEL) in Denver this fall.  It is, as the name indicates, an expeditionary learning (EL) school model that is been recognized as one of the top-performing schools in the state.  One reason so many families enter the competitive lottery is the […]

Available now!

If you would like to read the first chapter in PDF format, please subscribe here: 

Thank you for subscribing!

 Please follow this link to view the excerpt for 

The Future of Smart

Available on Amazon

The Future of Smart is available now!