Prior to coming to Atlanta and ANCS, I had the good fortune of coming to know three smart, dedicated school leaders–Deborah Meier and Ted and Nancy Sizer–while working in the Boston area. They wrote letters to the families of the schools they led in their schools’ weekly newsletters, hitting on important and current issues in the lives of their schools. (A collection of their letters is pulled together in a terrific book titled Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools.) When I became principal of our middle school in 2007, I followed their practice by writing my own weekly letters, offering a mix of updates about the week at school and thoughts about education more broadly. When I moved into the role of executive director, rather than bog down our weekly Courier with a third letter in addition to the main ones from our principals, I ventured into starting a blog, which I update each Tuesday that school is in session. Like my weekly letters, crafting a blog post (as opposed to getting really fancy and vlogging) is helpful to me because I’ve always been better able to process my thoughts through writing rather than through speaking because I am more focused (plus I hate the sound of my recorded voice). That aside, for those that read my blog, I’m usually writing for at least one of these three purposes:
- Communicating about ANCS’s philosophy and approach: For both our current families and for our prospective families (or prospective teachers for that matter), I use my blog to share in more detail what we do and why. For example, I recently posted about why we use a weighted student enrollment lottery, and in the past I’ve written about why we emphasize arts education and why we don’t have a formal “gifted and talented” program. Posts like these help to sharpen focus on the mission and values of our school.
- Putting what’s happening at ANCS in a larger context: While the work we do with and for students at ANCS is our primary focus, we have to keep in mind the world outside of our school as we do this work. A few weeks ago, I wrote about activities planned at ANCS in response to the most recent school shooting tragedy, all of which happened in the context of a larger national school walkout effort. Last year, I emphasized how the teacher residency program started at ANCS that has expanded to multiple area schools was an example of the sort of collaboration in which charter schools should be more engaged.
- Provoking discussion on big education policy issues: There’s been a tremendous amount of education policy churn over the past 15 or so years, and much of it has been, in my opinion, stifling to teachers and schools. In whatever small way my blog posts can help bring attention to the impact of education policy on schools, I try to use the forum to do so. Tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, the evolution in federal education law, and approaches to assessing student learning that go beyond multiple choice tests are some of the issues I’ve written about in the past.
If you’ve made it this far, then you are probably one of the handful of regular readers of my blog. If you happen to be a first-time reader, you should also know that every so often there is a post by a guest author, so it’s not always this educational policy stuff:) Either way, thanks for reading.