Here’s book number two.

Trusting Teachers With School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots, by Kim Farris-Berg, Edward Dirkswager, with Amy Junge. (Rowan and Litlefield)

The authors describe the how-tos at ten schools they view as operating collectively, run by teachers. They take up key practices, one by one and describe different ways these ten have approached teacher autonomy, and why it so vital to do so. Mission Hill is one of the ten—which of course leads me to wish they had referenced In Schools We Trust, a book I wrote about our work.  I wish more was said by the authors about how families and communities fit into these stories.  But it’s a subject rarely (if ever) talked or written about, so I’m hoping for a follow-up.  They have raised the critical issues in ways that everyone should be thinking about, because there’s something absurd about educating for democracy in schools that don’t at least try to practice it!

Of course, it’s important to read books that come from another viewpoint entirely.

Fortunately The Heartland Institute of Chicago sends me a monthly Policy Brief. November’s is entitled: The Parent Trigger, Justification and Design Guidelines, by Joseph Bast and Joy Pullmann.  In an odd way it agrees with the last  sentence of my review above. It makes both an infuriating and informative read into the futurist ideas of the right, about which I had surprisingly little knowledge. I didn’t know—nor dream of!!! We need to all understand what the authors of this report lay out as the future as they see it. Like me they see schools as representing the values of “democracy”  as they interpret it.  The trigger laws, for them, are the way for us to practice what we preach:  the free market itself as s form of democracy.