As members of Generations X and Y face a workplace dominated by boomers, they are all starting to chafe. Some colleges are having trouble attracting, managing, and sometimes retaining people younger than 35. Members of the younger generations grew up watching their parents sacrifice for their careers, and they want something different: balance and…

Slowly but surely, Generation Xers have been taking over from Baby Boomers as the majority of parents in elementary and secondary education. Gen-X parents and Boomer parents belong to two neighboring generations, each possessing its own location in history and its own peer personality. They are similar in some respects, but clearly different in…

For the last 25 years, American education has been trying to reform itself. This effort has been noble but only partially successful, and too often defined by an "either-or" dichotomy that has led to publicly defined "wars" over reading and math instruction, and even the very existence of the U.S. Department of Education. All…

Over 50% of the nation's teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years the nation could lose a third of its most accomplished educators to retirement. The wave of departures will peak during the 2010-11 school year, when over 100,000 veteran teachers could leave. In less than a decade more than half of today's teachers--1.7…

Defining and understanding a generation of Americans has always been difficult until years after the generation ends. Although there is universal agreement on the Baby Boomer generation (1946-1964) and most people agree that Generation X started in 1965 and ended around 1979, after that it gets murky. In his research, the author believes that the…

School administrators are facing the perfect storm: a growing number of baby boomers retiring each year, an absence of experienced teachers to take their place, and high turnover among young teachers. The need to hire and retain a new generation of teachers is one of the biggest challenges facing school administrators. To fill these vacancies,…