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

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.