WELCOME

You'll find this website optimistic about the future of public education in Minnesota . . . explaining the important innovation in schooling that has appeared here and how it now should and can be extended.

NEW WORK

State Strategy Is Having a 'Someone Else' Able To Do What the Districts Don't

The six short sections that follow cover the major questions that need clarification for a successful effort to redesign Minnesota public education. Each will be more fully developed in posts on this website over the coming weeks.

The first notes that over the 40-plus years since A Nation At Risk this country has moved from one attempt at 'school reform' to another, and consistently failed. Everyone is concerned. Everyone means well. Yet difficulties with school, system and students have continued to mount.

The second will suggest things would have been clearer if Ray Budde and Albert Shanker had never used the term 'charter schools' . . .

PREVIOUS WORK

Our state has been developing a remarkable new and different model of schooling

Its essentials are not complicated; they're just not clearly seen. They're obscured by the experience all of us have had with the 'givens' of traditional school which remain the dominant conception in the political, public and media discussion of public education.

The issue before the Legislature this year, raised by the appearance of this quite different model of schooling, is clear if we see it in terms of the process of change enacted by the Legislature over the past 60 years. [You will find, attached, a history of these legislative and district actions.

Read More . . .

The preface to this 2015 book insists that, to get any effective change, it is essential to 'think outside the box'.

Many readers will recognize this graphic as the puzzle designed to test one’s ability at problem-solving. You’re asked to connect the nine dots with four straight lines.

Within the ‘box’ created by the nine dots it cannot be done.

Nobody said you couldn’t run the lines outside the box.

• • •

Hemmed In by Our Preconceptions . . . ‘We Need To Try Different Routes to Solve Problems’

Paul MacCready and his Gossamer aircraft perhaps show us the way. (He won a large cash prize for a human-powered flight across the English Channel.) How did he do it when all the aeronautical experts had failed?

“Not having a background in structures permitted me to adapt some very simple-minded techniques . . .  All the serious groups in England had big teams of qualified people that included aircraft structural designers . . . 

The Center for Policy Design

LARGE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE:
Policy Design for Public Education, Healthcare, and Government

VISIT

ABOUT

This website continues the thinking about public education in which I've been engaged since 1982. Something of my experience appears here. Much of this work is collected
on the website of the Center for Policy Design.

YOUR THOUGHTS

I welcome your feedback and thoughts.

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