Category: In Our Schools
Education is crucial in building a democratic society. People make good decisions when they are informed and able to defend their rights. Knowledge is no longer understood as a set of facts that can be transmitted by rote. It has to be discovered—and rediscovered. Our schools are still using an autocratic system that is not conducive to learning how to learn or to self governing.
Educational equality is about more than teacher-seniority rules: It is about making the schools that serve poor children more attractive places for the smartest, most ambitious people to spend their careers. To do that, those schools need excellent, stable principals who inspire confidence in great teachers. They need rich curricula that stimulate both adults and children.
Dana Goldstein in the Atlantic, 11 June 2014. Author of The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled… Read More . . . “The California Tenure Decision, Part 1: Systems Failure” Residential communities customarily do not have board of directors members from outside the organization. Corporations normally do, but they may not be chosen by their ability to balance expertise. Non-profit organizationsThe Delibrative Democracy Consortium (DDC)u is an alliance o... and independent schools often choose board members based on their ability to raise money or influence government or foundation decision-makers.
Balanced Expertise
Balanced expertise on the board of directors steers the organization from multiple perspectives. Balance… Read More . . . “Outside Experts on the Board of Directors” A commentary on an Op-Ed in the New York Times by Joe Nocera, “How to Fix the Schools,” 18 September 2012.
Joe Nocero’s post in the New York Times today points out that the reason the Chicago schools won’t be helped by the teacher’s union strike that began this week is that both the teacher’s union and Rahm Emanuel are both focusing on the wrong issues. He quotes Marc Tucker of the National Center on… Read More . . . “If Hospitals Were Run Like Schools” In 1972 with a group of parents forming a cooperative school, predominantly young Yale faculty members who had moved to town to join a new college. We were committed to diversity and having a hard time recruiting people of color and from a different socio-economic class.
We were having an equally hard time finding appropriate space that we could afford. This was long before charter schools so we were funding the whole thing ourselves. We… Read More . . . “My Pivotal Consensus Experience” A wonderfully readable update on brain research is Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide that looks at how our emotions affect decisions and what the brain tells us about it. Lehrer worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine, and publishes regularly in major magazines and newspapers. He has both the education to interpret brain research and the ability to write about it clearly — welcome ability. And the… Read More . . . “How We Decide and Why It Matters” 
