In Brett Helm's post of March 23, 2011 he asked what a college going culture looked like.  Brett went on to detail a framework for determining what aspects go into creating that culture.  Recently, Brett and I had the opportunity to put this framework into practice by surveying school stakeholders and visiting one of our high schools in NYC.  Here is a snapshot of what we found.

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A current hot trend in the school reform debate centers on the time we spent educating students and how that time is scheduled.

As usual with education debates, evaluation of what the data means is somewhat mixed.
Over the course of the past few years, efforts to reform…

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Yesterday I had dinner with a young lady who just completed her 2nd year at Howard University.  This young lady is from the great city, Chicago, and is an alumnus of Richard T. Crane Technical Preparatory High School.  Why is this important?  Well not only am I from Chicago but I graduated from that same high school ages ago.

Long story short, our dinner hangout was long overdue.  From the conversation I learned that…

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During President Obama’s most recent State of the Union. Obama reinforced the notion that the United States must produce more college graduates in order to compete in a global economy. 
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Schools are unique institutions that require special leaders. Given the complexity of school systems, principals must possess a set of skills that dynamically intertwine business practices, a spirit of civil servitude, and ultimately a sheer will for educating youth.

School leadership is a tough job, and those who are called to the role of the principalship must be prepared to face a barrage of challenges from multiple arenas. There was a time when the role of principal was viewed as a manager and a democratic leader who had very little direct interaction with students, and simply…

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