Is Admin To Blame For All Our Problems

by | Mar 5, 2012 | Leadership News, US Schools

Although this editorial is about the education system in the US, it says some pretty provocative things about administrators in general.  I think most responsible administrators would accept a lot of responsibility for their school’s success or failure, but do they deserve the most blame?  Is poor leadership as endemic in school administration as Mr. White seems to think?  Are international schools different, or are our problems masked by our relatively high performing population? Paul D. White: Education Lost in Administration By Paul D. White NO education reform article I’ve ever read accurately identified the two real stumbling blocks to improving our K-12 school system. The reason is because almost all of them are written by school administrators – not teachers. Our schools are melting down – academically and morally – for two simple reasons that (contrary to what you’re told) have almost nothing to do with teacher quality or a lack of funding: Ineffective leadership at all levels and a refusal to hold parents accountable for their children’s behavior. That’s it. These two areas are the source of every single thing that’s wrong with our nation’s schools. School leaders would have you believe that public education’s failure is totally due to ineffective teaching. But their endless attempts to lay full blame on inadequate teachers, teacher training programs, tenure, nonspecific curriculum, etc., are nothing but camouflage blather, used to distract the public from the real causes of this problem. This problem starts at the top, with the U.S secretary of education. The education secretary is the symbolic head of all K-12 schools in the United States. Secretary Arne Duncan, like...

Make Room for the Introverts

by | Mar 3, 2012 | Leadership News, Video

A great TED Talk about society’s view of introverts and our obsession with extroverted leadership. How can we as teachers, administrators, parents, etc rethink the way we view introverts and extroverts?  Are you an introvert?  How about your school’s leaders?  Is your school a good place to be an...

Harvard Study: What Makes Young Leaders…

by | Feb 3, 2012 | Leadership News

Is the student who organizes tag during recess or chooses to help a classmate with math on track to be a senator, a CEO, or a community leader? He—or she—may well be. Behaviors like embracing novel experiences, supporting peers, even pestering parents for lessons can predict whether a child will emerge as a leader in adulthood, according to researchers who say they are the first to plot a pathway from childhood experiences to adult leadership. The research may also help educators encourage leadership—a commonly heralded “21st-century skill”—if teachers know what behaviors to look for and support, they say. Theories abound about what makes one child develop into a leader and another not, says Ronald E. Riggio, Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and editor of a special issue of the Leadership Quarterly, which last year published four studies of leadership development based on data going back to 1979. “There are these crazy ideas like pushy mothers or pushy fathers” feeding adult leadership success, he says, adding that research on leadership is often retrospective beginning with questions like, “What was Churchill’s mother like?” Rather than looking backward, the new studies use longitudinal data to test hypotheses about the relative importance of factors such as the role of parents, inner motivational drive, intelligence, childhood social skills, and personality traits like extroversion in shaping future leaders. To do the studies, researchers contacted the parents of every child born in Orange County, Calif., in 1979. They then tracked a sample of 106 subjects (whose parents agreed to participate and who stuck with the study) from the...