By Heidi Kraemer, Change Toolkit Program Manager

Welcome to Education Leadership Newsletter, the first Reinventing Education newsletter for 2006! As we start a new year, we felt it was critical to assess our efforts to date and "change" the newsletter to reflect your comments and questions about our tool and program. We hope this refreshed newsletter will help you more fully apply the CTK to your daily work as you learn how the CTK is helping education leaders across the globe think and work through change issues.

The quarterly newsletter will feature a current change topic and/or theme that is woven into each of the articles. There will continue to be the two lead articles on change written by a business and an education leaders, one or more articles written by educators in the field using the CTK, and finally a new section called "How to apply the CTK in 5 minutes or less," to help you make effective and immediate use of the CTK in your organization.

This newsletter features helping change projects get through the "difficult middles." All projects launch with excitement, but few seem to actually get to completion with or without that excitement. Why is that? What we know is too many get stuck in the middle and, sadly, fizzle out. The newsletter articles address that "middle" and how to persevere through it. After reading them, I challenge you to review the projects you are working on, take one idea from the newsletter and apply it to your project. Who knows, it may be the one idea you needed to get through the "middle!"

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of you for your interest in and use of the CTK! To date, more than 8,500 educators from all 50 states and 19 countries are using the CTK! We have an incredible range of education leaders from a variety of school systems, and I hope that you can share your experiences and knowledge in future issues of theses newsletters. At the top of the newsletter, you'll see a link that says, "submit a change toolkit story." Please consider sending information on your work with the CTK, no matter how big or small, by clicking on that link.

We hope you enjoy the Education Leadership Newsletter. We look forward to helping you successfully navigate the changes you are making to positively affect education today!

Mastering the Miserable Middles
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter
© Copyright 2005 by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, rkanter@hbs.edu.

Here's a lesson of leadership so common that I've seen it repeated in hundreds of innovations and change projects in every industry and field. It's "Kanter's Law": Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Plans don't unfold exactly as designed by the chief executive, the central administration, or the local manager.

Every new idea - the addition of a math enrichment program, a new teacher-led college counseling initiative, a move to block scheduling - can easily run into the unexpected before it becomes routine. Problems that crop up in the middle, before the effort is fully implemented, tempt leaders to give up, forget it, and chase the next enticing rainbow. But stop the effort too soon, and by definition it's a failure. Stay with it through its hurdles, make appropriate adjustments, and you are on the way to success.
read the full article

President Bush's 2006 Education Priorities
By Carrie Heath, Associate for Partnerships and Advocacy, CCSSO

President Bush laid out his education priorities for 2006 in the recent State of the Union Address and Fiscal Year 2007 (FY07) budget proposal. The president's agenda frames congressional discussions about education policies and funding, which ultimately impact states' abilities to fully implement standards-based reform and improve student achievement. President Bush's 2006 education agenda intends to build on America's global competitiveness through rigorous math, science, and critical foreign language instruction; improve high schools; and enable more parental choice. The president's move to become globally competitive and to reform America's high schools is a promising one, though it was followed by a haphazard education budget.

In his State of the Union Address on January 31, 2006, President Bush introduced a key piece of his 2006 agenda - the American Competitiveness Initiative....
read the full article

How to Herd Cats: Using the Toolkit to Implement Change in Vermont
 By Grace Suh, Senior Program Manager, IBM Corporation

When Bob McNamara came to Washington West Supervisory Union as a new superintendent 18 months ago, he knew he faced a challenge similar to what he calls "herding cats."

Washington West educates 2,000 students in eight schools – five elementary, two middle and one high school. The district's small size belies its complex governance structure. The schools are spread out over six towns in a rural area of the state. Each town has its own school board, plus there is a school board for the high school, and a separate school board for the whole system. The schools came together under one district not because of a common education philosophy but because of the need for a common high school.

"Because each board has its own policies and its own community culture," says Bob, "it's not easy to focus everyone on one agenda for change."
read the full article

Apply Change Toolkit in 5 Minutes or Less!
By Heidi Kraemer, Change Toolkit Program Manager

Are you stuck in a project that seems to have stalled or lost its way? There always seems to be that point in a project where you say, "How do we move this project forward?" or "Why is this so hard?" In the CTK, we call this "being stuck in the difficult middles."

If you are in this situation, the CTK has a tool to help you in 5 minutes or less! Here are six simple steps to working through the "difficult middle."