“Culture isn’t the most important thing. Culture is the only thing.”—Jim Senigal, CEO Costco (retired) Recently, a colleague of mine could not stop talking about CNBC’s production of The Costco Craze. I recorded it and watched it last night, and, I too, cannot stop talking about it. Why? While the report is about retail giant [...]
A minute is all it will take to read one of my summaries of current articles on the Common Core State Standards. Recently, I was explaining “close reading” to a colleague. After I hung up, I remembered the summary of an article that I had posted on my Common Core newsletter. So, I immediately emailed [...]
School reform leaders say that they want the best school leaders and teachers working with the neediest students.
The job of a school leader is much different at a school that serves large numbers of under-resourced students.
A report issued by Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd and summarized in Education Week indicates that “principals are facing shrinking budgets and mounting responsibilities to lead teachers and keep schools running—creating competing pressures that may make the job untenable.” In other words, principals are under more stress! This news cannot [...]
“A leader is worth nothing without voluntary commitment, because the followers are actually more in charge of the outcome.”
Bloggers Note: I have often said that the principal is the “cork in the bottle.” Nothing happens in a school without the full, active support of the principal. Raising rigor and increasing the number of students enrolled in college-level courses requires a strong belief in the potential of the students, the capacity of the teachers [...]
The College Board’s National Office of School Counselor Advocacy (NOSCA), together with NASSP and ASCA today announced the release of the Principal-Counselor Toolkit. The principal-counselor relationship is a dynamic and organic relationship that evolves over time in response to the ever-changing needs of a school. The goal of an effective principal-counselor relationship is to use [...]
Principals and teachers working in diverse, high-poverty schools are constantly challenged, even on a normal school day. In addition to the need to raise the achievement of each and every one of our students, our school had to overcome a number of externally imposed challenges. In fact, our teachers designed a t-shirt to commemorate our [...]
I could have sworn that goalie Tim Thomas was talking about the evaluation of principals when he met with the press following the Boston Bruins victory in the Stanley Cup Finals. Thomas, whose meteoric rise from minor league obscurity to Most Valuable Player (MVP) in the National Hockey League Finals, had a reaction that reminded [...]
