Over the last two months, I described six common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. In January, I tackled the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal. In February, I turned to another set of three myths including the myth of merit pay, the myth of accountability, and the myth of extrinsic motivators. The point of these two posts was to help education systems leaders see what not to do. I’m now going to turn to a set of 14 Principles that can be used by educational leaders to guide their transformation work. I’ll kick things off this month with an introduction to the Principles for Transformation. After this introduction, I’ll write twice monthly posts describing each principle.
Read MoreThere are frequent calls for transformation and reform in the education sector going back decades. As a starting point, I’m going to examine two reports -- one well-known (“A Nation at Risk”) and the other lesser so (the “Sandia Report”) -- that attempt to answer the question posed in the title. Over the next several posts, I will offer my own thoughts as to the need for educational transformation (spoiler alert, I think it is necessary). In those future articles, I’ll provide a definition for transformation as well as a description for what exactly we would be transforming from and what we would be transforming to. But first, let’s dive into those two reports.
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