Category: Jobs

Seeking New Center for School Change Director

The Center for School Change is seeking a new director.  CSC is a nationally known organization, established in 1989, that works at the school, community and policy levels. Due to medical issues, the current (founding) director intends to leave this position within the next three to six months.   CSC’s current work, a job description and application procedures are provided below.  More info is at  www.centerforschoolchange.org.

Starting Date:

We anticipate that the director would start sometime between November 1, 2015 and January 1, 2016. Current plans include a brief period of overlap during which the new and current director will work together. Then the new director will assume responsibility for the Center.

Job Description

The director will work closely with individuals and organizations that partner with the Center for School Change.  This includes policy-makers, community members, students, families, educators and funding organizations. The director will:

a. Take lead responsibility for carrying out currently funded projects.

b. Periodically write articles for various publications.

c. Make presentations to community and governmental organizations

d. Take lead responsibility in researching possible funders, and developing proposals for CSC funding.

e. Work with the CSC advisory committee.

f. Review, and potentially refine CSC’s strategic directions and strategies.

g. Work with contracted staff to maintain and update the Center’s website.

h. Work with the Center’s fiscal agent, EdVisions, to supervise the Center’s

i. Respond to questions from families, educators, students, policy-makers and journalists.

j. Other duties as appropriate.

Salary and fringe benefits: Commensurate with qualifications and CSC resources. 

This is a grant-funded position with CSC, an affiliate of EdVisions Schools.  Continuation of the position is dependent on performance and availability of funds.

Application Procedures

To apply to this position, please submit two items by October 2, 2015 to

joe@centerforschoolchange.org Please submit

1. A resume describing your work and educational experiences, 2 references

2. A letter with describing specific work/accomplishments in as many of the following areas as you have had significant experience. 

a. The letter should include no more 100-125 words on up to ten

b. Please write a paragraph only in those areas where you have had different areas, listed below.  You may not have had experiences in each area. 

experience.  We anticipate the person selected will have experiences in several but not necessarily all of the following areas.

1. Working as a teacher and or administrator in a district and/or charter public school that succeeded in helping students make progress, measured in various ways.

2. Working successfully toward specific goals with people from other ethnic and racial groups

3. Managing complex, multi-year projects to help improve one or more public schools.

4. Writing proposals to funding organizations (i.e. foundations and government agencies)

5. Developing and supervising budgets

6. Writing a blog and/or writing articles that have been published

7. Working with local and/or state policy-makers (i.e. school board members, state legislators, governors, and their staffs)

8. Developing products or services that educators, families or others purchased.

9. Demonstrating a deep, sustained passion for improving public education, closing achievement gaps and helping create a more just, equitable system.

10. Working with district, charter, rural/urban/suburban educators, families and students.

Current work of the Center for School Change:

With support from the Bigelow, Carlson, St. Paul, Travelers Foundations and Generation Next, the Center is working with 3 metro area district and charter public schools. The overall goal is to help them involved at least 50% of their 11th and 12th graders in dual (high School/college) credit courses by June

With support from the Bremer Foundation and several individuals, the Center is working with the Brooklyn Center High School, and charters in Owatonna and Willmar, to help at least 50% of their 11th and 12th graders participate in dual enrollment courses by June 2017.

With Bush Foundation support, CSC is partnering with several groups to convene a conference on improving schools and increasing job opportunities.

CSC is helping monitor implementation of legislative efforts involving College in the Schools/Concurrent Enrollment and Post-Secondary Enrollment

Options.

Center staff write periodic columns for various publications, and actively shares research and other information with journalists.

CSC staff regularly respond to inquiries about education issues from parents, families, journalists, school board members, legislators and legislative staff.

As I said in the last e news, on August 31st I returned from one of the most important gatherings I've ever participated in. As promised, here are the details of the conference.

For six days I was at theInternational Week of Alternative Education in Bogota, Colombia. There were more than a thousand participants from all over South America.  Of the invited core participants I was the only one from the United States,  the only native English speaker.  It reminds me of the time I went to the First New Schools Festival of the Soviet Union in August 1991, opening up dialog between the West and Eastern European educational alternatives for the first time. The last day I was at Yeltzin's White House. The next day,  by the time my return train reached England, Yeltzin had faced down the tank in the very place I had been standing, the coup collapsed, and there was no more Soviet Union.

To get to the airport by 5 AM I was up at 3:30. The flight was on Avianca, the same Colombian airline that ran out of fuel and crashed on Long Island many years ago. We haven’t forgotten. And I don't like to fly anyway. But the airline is actually quite modern and relatively comfortable. But I didn’t get much sleep.

My first experience on arrival in Colombia was sharing a ride to the conference with Ignasio, who founded a precedent-setting Montessori school in Chile. He spoke almost no English and I spoke almost no Spanish, but through sign language, gestures, a phone translator and videos we became good friends! Not long after arriving at the hotel I found myself blindly following him as we traveled in a taxi to find German (Hermann) Doin, the conference organizer. Bogota traffic is hair raising! One of the first things we saw was a motorcycle accident. By the way, its population is over 7 million, as big or bigger than New York City!

It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized that we were going to a showing of a remarkable documentary at a local alternative college. It was of a program in Ecuador to save traumatized babies and either reunite them with retrained families or adoptive families. The maker of this beautiful film is an engineer who made it of his wife’s dedicated work. At the end of the conference he gave me a copy of it.

At the showing I got to meet German, the filmmaker of La Educacion Prohibita, the film about educational alternatives that has galvanized South America. I had met him at the IDEC in Puerto Rico. It was by his invitation that I had come. He had convinced the Bogota Minister of Education to underwrite the conference.

The bus to the conference site left at 7:30 AM. There were over a thousand attendees this day. There were 17 countries represented at the conference. I was the only one from the USA, the only native English speaker. I was a panelist on one of the forums, Education and Democracy. There were over 250 in the audience, mostly public school students and teachers, arranged by the Minister of Education. I don’t think I have ever experienced that before, in any language. Justo from Nuestra Escuela in Puerto Rico did translation for me. It was one of the most remarkable large sessions I have ever been a part of.

There were representatives of alternatives from Brazil, Argentina and other countries. Leonardo, who has organized an unschooling program set the tone by saying he was uncomfortable being up front on a panel in front of the audience. Therefore we quickly asked the audience to start out by sending up questions, which were distributed to the panel after introductions. The students and teachers in the audience were very engaged sometimes taking the microphone for questions or statements. They were very excited to find such alternatives existed.

There was actually a vote from the audience on whether we should change the format of the forum. When most didn’t vote, that was also discussed. I pointed out that abstention was a legitimate position, especially if some were skeptical of the process. The Deputy Minister of Education was on the panel.

After the session the teachers and students in the audience mobbed the panelists for questions and autographs.

Later I had a meeting with people from an indigenous Colombian tribe about helping them set up a survival school to save their language and culture. I had helped the Mohawks start the first one in 1971.

That evening I had an interesting talk with people from Sao Paulo, Brazil about the alternatives there. One of them, Helena Singer, actually met me at my house in New York before going to Brazil to set up one school that is still going. She now works as an assistant to the Brazilian Minister of Education to organize groups around the country who want to do innovative work in education. I found out that there was a similar conference planned for this week in Brazil and was invited to come, but it was too late to arrange it.

The next day we took a spectacular trip to an experimental school in the mountains on the outskirts of Bogota, The altitude was over 9000 feet! There the core group had a day-long session to work on finding common ground and possibly creating a manifesto and plan to change education in South America,  

Among other things we offered free membership to organizations attending the conference. Many are now added to our member list and map. A Colombian government consultant gave me a copy of a book that had a chapter he wrote about homeschooling! I traded some books for beadwork by an indigenous group from Ecuador that has formed a homeschool center. The government had closed their alternative public school. Later I had a long talk with Gabrielle, an 85-year-old educational pioneer in Mexico who has made significant changes in 9000 schools in the direction of a learner-centered approach.

In the discussion about a manifesto, I mentioned that I don’t like such declarations because they could not speak for every individual. I even wondered if the concept was the opposite of our ideas of individuality and uniqueness. And in the past I had seen such documents exploit unsuspecting groups.

Nevertheless I played with the idea of a manifesto that could actually reach common ground and I came up with this:

"We believe that education should be learner-centered. We believe that students, parents and teachers should be empowered to create and change the way they learn and what they learn. They should have the right to establish the form of education that meets their needs, including public and private schools and home education."

What do you think?

Despite the opposition of some members, in the end a group did come up with a manifesto, but I haven’t yet seen the English translation.

On the next to last day I was interviewed for a Youtube video. One question I was asked was: What one thing could you suggest that would change things in education? I responded: Keep the class doors open so that students can come in or go out as they please.

That evening we all went to a concert in the botanical garden. The first performer was a band whose instruments were all made from trash. Even the guitar was made of a table leg. And the power for the instruments was provided by a bicyclist on stage!

On the last day German had arranged for a car to take me and two others to the Kalapa School up in the Northern mountains just outside of Bogota. It is a school that AERO has helped to start. The founders attended the AERO conference last year and this year, went back and started their school. Among other things the school is democratic and uses elements they learned from the Agile Learning Center and Pono, AERO schools they visited during the AERO conference.

The setting of the school is one of the most beautiful I have seen, with thatched roof buildings, expansive land and mountains behind to climb. We had a long meeting with the parents, answering many questions. Yvan from Politeia School in Sao Paulo was very helpful in his responses to some of the parents.

After an hour and a half ride back to the hotel through Bogota traffic I got ready to leave for the airport. The manifesto committee applauded themselves as they completed their work. There were long goodbyes. A group of six of us were brought to the airport and said more goodbyes there.

Time will tell if this gathering was as significant as I think it was in opening up communication between the Americas.