How One District Answered 13,000 Voices
Aldine ISD’s HEAL Center expands healthcare pathways through community voice, industry partnership, and real-world learning.
He Showed Me What One Person Could Do: A Tribute to Jon Ketler
When Jon Ketler, founder of the Tacoma School of the Arts, passed away recently, Getting Smart contributor Chris Unger sat down to capture what made him extraordinary. This tribute is more than a remembrance. It is a masterclass in what visionary school design actually looks like when one person decides to stop waiting for permission and start building. Education leaders who have ever wondered whether a single individual can change a system will find both proof and inspiration here.
A Hint is Not a Diploma: Consequential Educational Decision Making in the Multimodal AI Era
As AI accelerates into every corner of schooling, education leaders face a question that is both urgent and deeply human: who holds the gavel? In this provocative new piece, Eric Tucker argues that the real risk is not AI itself but our failure to govern it proportionally, treating a graduation algorithm with the same scrutiny as a spelling hint. This consequence-tiered framework gives leaders, policymakers, and educators a practical architecture for protecting learners while keeping innovation alive.
What Ecosystem Stewards Know That System Leaders Don’t — Yet
What does it actually take to steward a learning ecosystem, and how is that different from leading a system? Karen Pittman and Merita Irby spent a year inside four community intermediaries, including CommunityShare, the PAST Foundation, and Heart of Oregon Corps, and surfaced three prerequisites that change everything: trust, time, and idea translation. This post is essential reading for any leader working to connect education, youth development, and workforce systems into something greater than the sum of their parts.
When Scale Gets Ahead of Learning
Why honest naming matters in education redesign: distinguish R&D from implementation so leaders scale learning, not assumptions.
Coalition Before Consensus: How Trust and Shared Ownership Sustain Transformation
System transformation rarely fails because of a bad strategy. It fails because the relationships needed to sustain it were never built. In this piece, Rebecca Midles and Nate McClennen draw on real district leaders to show what coalition-building actually looks like when the messy middle arrives. From a rural Michigan superintendent who started with the willing to a Kansas City microschool that put students in the design seat, this is a practical and deeply human look at what makes change last.
What Should Leadership Look Like in the Age of Generation Alpha? Why Leadership Competencies Are More Important Than Ever
Education leaders must respond to six system shifts with clear vision, adaptive leadership, and future-ready competencies.
Great Partnerships Are Like Gumbo, Not Fast Food
What does sustainable school improvement actually look like in a large, high-need district? In this piece, researchers and practitioners from East Baton Rouge Parish Schools share how a three-year research-practice partnership, built on shared values, rigorous evidence, and relational trust, moved the needle on math learning for more than 38,000 students. It is a model worth studying for any district leader tired of one-and-done professional development and ready to build something that lasts.
Prepare Your People, Protect Your People: Setting the Stage for Successful Change Management
In an era of rising resistance and restrictive legislation, asking educators to take risks without protecting them is not leadership, it is liability. Jennifer D. Klein, author of Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership, offers a clear-eyed framework for how school leaders can prepare their people with transformative professional learning, adapt systems to support innovation, and stand as a buffer when opposition arrives. This is the kind of piece that reminds education leaders why the soul of their work has always been human development, for adults as much as students.
Maritime | 253: Project-Based Learning at Port Scale
By: Deepti Reim The world of work is changing rapidly, requiring workers who can navigate evolving technologies, collaborate across disciplines, and adapt to increasingly complex operational systems. K-12 systems around the country are constantly trying to evolve alongside these changes, transforming Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs to better prepare students for life beyond the diploma.