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In response to your question, "Is it more important to be bold than effective?" my response would be, "no."

Its important to be both bold AND effective.

These concepts need not be looked at as a dichotomy, where one must be chosen over the other. If we overdrive boldness at the expense of solid, grounded, effectiveness we wear out people, organizations, and create chaos. Alternatively, if we forgo boldness for security and safety, the world leaves us behind and we get more irrelevant by the minute.

The approach you suggest in "going boldly" in a collaborative manner is the right one. That's getting tougher and tougher to do as the rhetoric heats up and the lines in the sand get increasingly drawn.

Good article Claus.

Jason Glass
Eagle, CO

Thank you, Jason--

I agree. And "bold" is often in the eye of the beholder. Many of the reforms championed by the Consortium for Chicago School Research--greater parent involvement, professional development,, etc.--are often considered old hat. But the reality is that they are seldom put into practice.... Bold, indeed!

The boldest plans are designed by teachers and their associations: health care for all children, fully qualified teachers in every classroom, infant care and preschool for our most disadvantaged children, full-service community centers, and so forth. These are changes that will make a difference.

Any plan that ignores the input of teachers is not bold; it's useless.

I'm with Linda here--ignoring the foot soldiers while planning the attack, assuming they'll go along, when it's their life work that will carry out the plan--and they're the ones who pay the price when the plan fails--renders all the bold and innovative planning useless.

In my state, there have been editorials in the papers claiming that teachers are standing in the way of educational progress, and have cost schools hundreds of millions of (fantasized) dollars, because they did not universally sign on to all the (already legislated) changes.

It's not that teachers don't want change. They do--but they want to be full partners in the reform, not objects of reform.

I really couldn't understand, what exactly 'bold' meaning did you use?

Claus, You make an important point. I have observed that the mantra for effective leaders is: Go slow, in the beginning of a new initiative, to go fast later.
John Simmons, Strategic Learning Initiatives, Chicago

I have been thinking much the same thing Claus. We seem to be more engaged in the NEED to make changes and grandstanding about big, bold ideas (most of which are just re-packaged) than we are about coming up with real, collaborative solutions. For the last two decades the politicians, business leaders and pundits have vilified educators and education groups and assumed they were the only champions of real "reform" efforts. The lesson here should be that the real change that is desperately needed will ONLY come if we suspend the blame game and get serious about collaborating on the issues and strategies; if we respect each other and the variety of perspective and expertise we all bring to the table. Will everyone be happy? Unlikely. But we cannot afford to educate another generation of students in systems that do not adequately prepare them for the future while we argue about who should be involved in the process. Thanks for bringing this conversation out in the open!

We know that many children enter kindergarten 2-3 years behind. They haven't a fluent language, they haven't been exposed to books, and their parents work many jobs to feed and house them. In all my 30+ years of teaching and now a school board member, I've never heard anyone in power address this problem. I've heard about cutting Headstart, not expanding it. In today's environment many families can no longer afford quality preschools. If we are truly serious about our education system we must be willing to invest in quality free or reduced preschools for all.

Things are so bad that in Arizona our legisture won't even fund all day kindergarten. We have bold goals, but absolutey no way to achieve them. As a society, how committed are we?

Blaming teachers, administrators and public schools is the easy way out. Real change has to begin with the youngest members of our community.