Book Review:  You Can’t Be What You Can’t See

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Book Review:  You Can’t Be What You Can’t See .  By Milbrey W. McLaughlin http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/you-can-t-be-what-you-can-t-see Opening Eyes This book is well named.  Opportunity opens the eyes of young people to new futures.  Opportunity changes lives.  Milbrey McLaughlin, professor emeritus at Stanford University, shows how an Out of School Time (OST) program in Chicago’s Cabrini Green,…

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Positive Success Mentors: My Brother’s Keeper

man in black crew neck shirt wearing black framed eyeglasses and black hat

Positive Success Mentors: My Brother’s Keeper Beliefs and practices are needed to close opportunity gaps. There is a wealth of good work on reframing our beliefs about institutional racism and white privilege.  Finding practices that close opportunity gaps is harder.  During my time as superintendent in Seattle, we had literally dozens of initiatives intended to…

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Keeping Hope Alive in Tough Times

grayscale photo of no smoking sign

Keeping Hope Alive … In Tough Times These are challenging times for educational leaders.  Expectations for student learning keep rising while available funds shrink.  Leaders face pressures to balance budgets, keep teacher salaries competitive, AND invest more in student learning.  Often the district leaders, especially the superintendent, are the only ones that see the bigger…

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Growing Instructional Leadership

Growing Instructional Leadership. We have made incredible progress in the area of instructional leadership.  As I came up through the ranks, principals often earned their job for time served.  Keeping the doors open and the buses running was the expectation.  Then came the effective schools research and the idea that good teaching mattered.  Good schools…

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