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ron saari

How To Explain the Michelle Rhee Syndrome: The Big Picture | Larry Cuban on School Refo... - 1 views

  • Historically, when the nation has a cold, schools sneeze. Examples are legion. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (1958) aimed at getting better math and science teachers National problems of drug and alcohol abuse and tobacco smoking has led to states mandating courses to teach children and youth about the dangers of all of these substances. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960s’s spilled over the schools across the nation. Christian groups have pressured school boards to have prayer in schools, teach creationism, and vouchers (Educational Policy-2004-Lugg-169-87). The U.S. has competed economically with European and Asian countries for markets in the 1890s and since the 1980s. Each time that has occurred, business leaders turned to the schools to produce skilled graduates then for industrial jobs and now for an information-based economy.
  • This vulnerability to political stakeholders is very clear now with business and civic leaders pushing schools to be more efficient and effective in competing with China, Japan, and Germany.
  • In big cities where the problem of bad schooling is worst, results-driven reformers want mayors to take over schools and appoint their own superintendents, individuals who will accept no excuses from teachers and principals, will fight union rules, raise test scores, and create more charter schools.
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  • In American culture there is a decided historical preference for individual action, technological fixes (“miracle cures,” “silver bullets”) to problems, and heroic leaders.  And here at the intersection of cultural traits and a dominant business-driven school reform agenda stretching back over a quarter-century is where Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan, Geoffrey Canada, and similar figures enter the Big Picture.
  • The current business-dominated reform agenda is harnessed to heroic, media-wise individuals carrying tool-kits filled with charter schools, union-busting devices, and pay-4-performance schemes. This agenda and bigger-than-life individuals place major attention on  ineffective teachers as the major reason for poor student performance in schools.
  • Yes, the conflating of urban schools with all U.S. schools is as damaging a fiction as schools being responsible for economic growth and heroic leaders saving urban schools. No one says such things about schools and teachers in LaJolla (CA), Northbrook (IL), and Massepequa (NY). 
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    I don't always agree with Cuban on his views of tech integration, but he has a wonderful way of explaining the "big picture" which helps us understand what's happening better. 
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    interesting article about school reformers
Bradford Saron

School-by-School vs. System Reform: Why Business Leaders Need to Go Back to the Future ... - 0 views

  • Do you remember those days?  Well, they are gone. Over the last 30 years, the dominant American firms have gone global.  Thirty years ago, they weighed in on American education policy because they were scared to death that they would be unable to compete because they would not be able to hire a competitive work force.  Now, they care as much as ever about getting a competitive work force, but they have learned that they can find the people they need at whatever skill level they require all over the globe, and often in greater quantity and at less cost than they can get them in the United States.  If they can't get what they need for their research and development labs or their distribution centers or their factories here in the United States, they can get them in Singapore or India or China or Hungary.
  • They tend to be deep believers in "disruptive change."  They typically distrust government and the "system," and adopt a rather libertarian outlook.  Rather than work within the education system, they tend to support people and entities that work outside the system or work hard to challenge it.  They distrust education professionals and prefer instead to trust young, bright, well-educated people who are willing to take the system on.  In short, they identify with and give their support to people like themselves.  They are big backers of individual charter management organizations and of policies that would strengthen charter schools, which they see as taking on the system.  It is very doubtful whether the charter school movement would have gotten away from the starting gate without these deep pocketed, very committed supporters.
  • I very much hope that, as the new generation of business leaders that has provided so much support to charters and other entrepreneurial efforts in education take pride in their successes, they also recognize the limitations of those efforts, and turn their talents and their influence to another, much more difficult challenge:  How to greatly improve the system that educates all the children in this country.
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    Hat tip: @mcleod
Bradford Saron

Social Media for School Leaders « Powerful Learning Practice - 1 views

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    Lots of resources.
Bradford Saron

Principals as Instructional Leaders-Again and Again | Larry Cuban on School Reform and ... - 0 views

  • Because principals, like teachers and superintendents, have limited hours and energy (e.g., spending time with family, friends, sleep, exercise, reading–need I go on?), they face tensions over what they should choose to do each day. Thus, choices become compromises to ease tensions entangled in their teaching, managing, and politicking roles.
  • principals and teachers having a shared understanding of what “good” teaching is.
  • Everyone wants principals to be instructional leaders but no one wants to take away anything from the principals’ job.
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    Classic Cuban, in his ability to explain and eloquently capture our experience.
Vince Breunig

Whac-A-Mole Leadership - 2 views

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    Whac-A-Mole is similar to the daily routine of a principal. From the time you arrive at school in the morning until late in the evening, moles pop up. Your job is to address each mole and to prioritize which one is most important. In this article, I am going to describe the 'Six Moles' a principal must address in order to be a good leader.
Bradford Saron

VIVA ISEA Project - Re-Imagining School Leadership for the 21st Century | VIVA Teachers - 8 views

    • Bradford Saron
       
      Neat idea for updating expectations for school leaders.
    • Joan Wade
       
      It is a good way to redesign school leadership.
  • Teacher Leaders must be compensated adequately for the additional time they spend fulfilling their leadership duties.
    • Joe Schroeder
       
      Brad, you rock!
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    Re-branding school leadership. 
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    Great article!
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    Agreed
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    Very insightful.
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    Timely contribution to the conversation on this topic.
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    Thanks for sharing this article with us Brad. Stimulates interesting ideas.
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    Thanks Brad.
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    Rewarding initiative and effort.
Bradford Saron

The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready? - Forbes - 1 views

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    Begs the question, what type of leaders do organizations need when employees are empowered? 
Bradford Saron

Great Leaders Serve - How to Create a Strategic Plan (Part 1) - 1 views

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    Great resource for starting the process!
Bradford Saron

Digital Literacy for School Leaders - LiveBinder - 0 views

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    Love the live binder format. 
Curt Rees

Awe (a mindful leadership blog) « Linked 2 Leadership - 0 views

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    Love this.  Being a mindful and present leader. 
Bradford Saron

New technologies v. new behaviors | Dangerously Irrelevant - 4 views

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    I love the way he pointed to leaders, and how we need to get it to lead it!
Bradford Saron

John West-Burnham's Seven Questions for Leaders of Learning - Ewan McIntosh | Digital M... - 0 views

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    Awesome.
Bradford Saron

Cognitive Interfund Transfer: Leaders Managing Shifts in Technology is the Future of Le... - 0 views

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    New blog post. 
Bradford Saron

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Introduction to Communications Technologies - 0 views

  • Henry Jenkins COMM 202 Introduction to Communications Technology This course is intended as an introduction to the ways new and emerging communications technologies impact our culture. While the primary focus will be on digital and mobile technologies and practices (contemporary new media), the course will also consider a range of older media when they were new - including print culture, cinema, television, recorded sound, photography, and the telephone. The course is divided into three broad units: Understanding Technological Change is intended to offer broad conceptual frameworks for thinking about the relations between technology and culture. Reinventing... takes as its starting point the ways that the emergence of digital, networked, and mobile communications technology has impacted pre-existing media forms. Rethinking... examines a range of institutions and practices as they are re-imagined in response to the introduction of new communications technologies. Taken as a whole, this class will introduce students to: Core issues concerning the study of communications technologies The process of media in transition The ways that new media impact existing media and institutions Core digital platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, eBay, Flickr, Second Life, etc.) and the ways they are reshaping our everyday lives.
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    Here is Henry Jenkins' (a leader in the edtech think-tank style publications) new class on technology.
Bradford Saron

The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

  • The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.
  • How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?
  • social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.
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  • New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before.
  • Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic.
  • THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
  • Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
  • This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called "the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.
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    The power of being digitally social, this is an example in the political arena. This is also what Clay Shirky is talking about in a Cognitive Surplus. This is the power of people collaborating and sharing without consideration of cost, distance, time, copyright, law, etc. Do we want to teach children how to ethically participate in this type of environment? Or, just let them go without any skills or discipline?
Bradford Saron

Cognitive Interfund Transfer: #edtech-ies Vs School Leaders - 2 views

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    New blog post.
Bradford Saron

Meet 10 superintendents who are exemplary ed-tech leaders | AASA | eSchoolNews.com - 1 views

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    What do these administrators do that we can do or already do? 
Bradford Saron

10 recent books well suited for quoting in School-leader Graduation remarks «... - 0 views

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    Hope this helps in the upcoming graduation season!
Bradford Saron

Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    We need to also patch in program update for the leaders who would actually facilitate the reform too!
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