Whenever the author talks to audiences about transforming school systems, without exception people raise objections. The half dozen most common objections often come in the form of "Yes, nice idea but..." What follows the "but" is the objection. The author learned a technique for responding to these "buts" from family members who work in sales.…

Superintendents have the burden and the opportunity to exert leadership through the budget-building process. This article details a dozen tenets which can be implemented by practicing superintendents. Doing so increases the chances of building trust among the stakeholders of administrators, staff, community, and school board members. The district…

This essay contends that America's economic and social prosperity depends on nurturing and improving graduate programs, and that both universities and policy makers need to act in some very specific ways to secure future success. It first looks at the relationship between graduate training and prosperity, next considers the vulnerabilities in…

Offering a counter-narrative to the school improvement prescriptions that dominate national education debates, a new book based on 15 years of data on public elementary schools in Chicago identifies five tried-and-true ingredients that work, in combination with one another, to spur success in urban schools. The authors liken their "essential…

Understanding the role that poverty and racism play in the educational and socioeconomic barriers that confront racially and ethnically diverse youth is critical to affecting positive change with youth. Teaching principles, solutions, and basic concepts to make education a viable, life-giving experience for young people of color are discussed.

The importance of quality education in nation building cannot be over emphasized. There have been several calls on the educational managers on how to make the educational system to be more vibrant in the quality of its products after several quantity of mass failure and half baked products from our various educational institutions in the country.…

Road runner. File jockey. Advisor. Public speaker. Recruiter. At any given time, an admissions counselor fits one, some, or all of these descriptors. While all of these descriptors indicate an important function within a college or university, none reflects the increasingly complex nature of the role of an admissions counselor in strategic…

The statutory right to request time to train for all employees is the right way forward for UK plc and for workers. The coalition government not implementing this legislation in full would be a backward step. The author says this with such certainty because the status quo in which a third of employers don't train their workers and 10 million…

Economic, technological, and demographic developments have changed our world, and schools of education need to change to meet the new challenges. To help them meet these changes, the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship was designed to attract high-ability individuals to teaching careers in math and science in high-need urban and rural schools and,…

Librarians face many challenges when dealing with issues of privacy within the mediated space of social networking sites. Conceptually, social networking sites differ from libraries on privacy as a value. Research about Generation Y students, the primary clientele of undergraduate libraries, can inform librarians' relationship to this important…

What have we learned from 25 years of experience with external academic quality assurance that can help design more effective framework conditions for assuring academic standards? The key elements appear to be the structure and means of evaluating national academic quality assurance agencies, the nature of academic quality information mandated by…

The observation that anatomical course offerings have decreased in undergraduate biology curricula is supported by a survey of undergraduate institutions in the state of Washington. This reduction, due partially to increased emphasis in other areas of the biology curriculum, along with the lack of anatomy prerequisites for admission to most…

Over the past few years, access to quality and meaningful training opportunities has become more challenging. Library training coordinators across the United States express the same frustration of trying to fill classes with staff members from library branches that often cannot spare a team member for training. In this article, the author, who is…

This article surveys the past, present, and future trends of counseling in China. Historically, mental health problems were addressed within the family. Currently, psychotherapy from trained practitioners is available on a limited basis, at least in urban settings. The challenge of mental health in China is tremendous, and the efforts to meet that…

The U.S. school mathematics curriculum changed slowly during the last century, and only in the past few decades have there been serious efforts to establish it nationally rather than having it be, at least in principle, locally determined. Waves of change have periodically swept the curricular ocean, but on the seabed, in the classrooms where…