Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Sitting in the awestruck crowd last night at Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo show in Denver, I started thinking about school principals. Not the most logical of segues, perhaps. My explanation is that watching world-class acrobats promotes mental gymnastics.

All kidding aside, seeing these amazing artists perform mind-boggling feats of strength and agility brought home the value of combining innate talent with sustained, focused effort. To perform in Cirque du Soleil, one must be born gifted, but then must hone those gifts through countless hours of practice and repetition.

Watching the show, I wondered how the cirque finds so much talent. I looked on the company website today, and learned that worldwide, Cirque has almost 1,000 performers under contract.

One thousand world-class gymnasts, acrobats, jugglers. The organization keep growing, and keeps finding more talent.

So, here are your essay questions for the weekend:  why can’t school systems find and develop a solid cadre of…

A few months ago I ran into my friend Michael Bennet and told him he was crazy if he didn’t hire Rob Stein to become the principal of Manual High School. Bennett gave me his best Cheshire Cat non-committal smile and moved on. Not being crazy, two weeks later he announced that Rob Stein had been selected Manual’s new leader.

Now the question is whether Rob Stein was crazy to take the job.

It is, after all, the most high profile education challenge in Denver Public Schools. When the announcement came out that Stein was selected, the Rocky Mountain News ran a full page photo of him on the cover. Normally the only time an educator appears in a front page picture is when it’s a blond female teacher arrested for seducing a student.

Stein has any number of challenges. His appointment was at least a month late, which means he started out behind schedule for recruiting both…

This week’s News Schools Venture Fund meeting in New Orleans left us pondering the question of the need for autonomous schools to drive structural change in public school systems. And, as speakers pointed out, qualified leadership is the linchpin to making this work.

In recent years, Colorado education advocates have seen many smart visitors come and advocate more autonomy for principals, as a means to improve school and student performance. A few years ago, William Ouchi summarized his National Science Foundation-funded book (Making Schools Work, 2003) findings and advocated for pushing all funding down to the school level, via weighted student formula, and giving principals freedom to spend it as they see fit. Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education have talked and written about similar approaches to reform.

But, the pushback is often about whether many/most principals really have the training, ability, and desire to take on more…