Ted Kolderie writes that the current arrangement of K-12 public education is an obstacle to school and district improvement and that state leaders have an important role to play in shaping system-wide change.

Creating the Capacity for Change: How and Why Governors and Legislatures Are Opening a New-Schools Sector in Public Education

Education & Teaching

Ted Kolderie

Schools & Teaching

Editorial Projects in Education

By itself neither deploring the problem nor reaffirming the goal makes anything happen. To solve a problem and to reach a goal, to get a system restructured or a new idea passed into law, there has to be a How. This book is about how one American state successfully reinvented its regional governance . . . revised its public finance . . . reorganized its hospital system . . . is re-forming its public education and reconceiving its system of urban transportation. It is hopeful about our public sector. But the story it tells is clear: Politics can't do it alone. Government needs a strong civic sector to push elected officials to think about the causes of problems, and to provide them radical but implementable strategies for policy action. Unhappily, our civic infrastructure today might not be up to the job at the state and local level where that has to happen. This description of its essentials, this analysis of its successes, shows what will be needed to revive that essential civic dimension of public life.

Thinking Out the How

Beaver's Pond Press, Inc.

This is a challenging but a hopeful book. Its author - involved for more than 30 years with education policy and politics at the local, state and national level - insists this country could be getting a lot more than it is from both its students and their teachers. Innovation, gradually spreading and steadily improving, is systemic change. That is the way successful systems change. This new 'theory of action' will turn education into a self-improving system. The Split-Screen Strategy explains how that can be done with a strategy that creates a 'climate of encouragement for innovation', opening the way for schools and teachers to try things. This different approach asks educators - and our policy leadership - to rethink the notion that change is 'something the boss does' . . . to consider how differently teachers would behave and how they would change school if they had truly professional roles . . . how much better students would learn if school were organized to maximize motivation . . . how much more effective the national government would be if presidents made their proposals not to Congress but to the legislatures in whose law the education system exists. Endlessly deploring the problems and endlessly reaffirming the need to 'do better' does not move anything ahead. We need to get education changing the way successful systems change. The book explains what boards of education can do, what state legislatures and governors can do. It sets out dramatically different roles for the national government - and a surprising role for teacher unions. 
 A free downloadable PDF is available to students by contacting the publisher, Beaver's Pond Press.

The Split Screen Strategy: How to Turn Education Into a Self-Improving System

Beaver’s Pond Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ted Kolderie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ted Kolderie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ted Kolderie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Creating the Capacity for Change: How and Why Governors and Legislatures Are Opening a New-Schools Sector in Public Education

Thinking Out the How

The Split Screen Strategy: How to Turn Education Into a Self-Improving System