Principals, if you don’t have your staff hired and ready for back to school, you have my sympathy. As all school leaders know, the best hiring season for teachers is early in the calendar year (around January to March). At...
Tag - Accountability
I’ve written about teacher accountability before, but I recently read a few things that got me thinking. The first was a report out of Los Angeles that showed that nearly half the teachers in Los Angeles’...
Education Week likes to frustrate me in the morning. Reading their article today about the retreat of the anti-testing suburban opt-out movement, I should have been happy, but a few word-bytes in it are restating flimsy...
Imagine a doctor knowing vital, life-saving information about your health, but not sharing it with you. It would be not only unacceptable, it would be grounds for dismissal. Choosing not to act, when the data shows that the...
This week was Teacher Appreciation Week, one of my favorite weeks. After all, it honors a profession that should be considered one of the most important vanguards of our communities. They have one of the hardest and most...
Time and time again, I’ve heard educators say that the lack of parental engagement in their schools is what is holding them back. But, when I listen to families, in Philly or Chicago or any other urban city, I hear about the...
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently penned an op-ed on the importance of excellent principals. Among his chief assertions is the notion that great principals are the key driver of school improvement:...
Zachary Wright shares his reflection on some of the silly conversations that occur about governance. His original blog can be found on Education Post. Politics makes strange bedfellows. As a liberal who is theoretically...
By last December, the fall of my ninth year of teaching high school, I had been observed by teacher coaches, visitors from educational non-profit organizations, principals and assistant principals, no fewer than 15 times. Each...
This blog was originally written by Joshua Starr, CEO of PDK International, and published on Chalkbeat. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Sharif El-Mekki, the principal of a Mastery Charter School campus in...