After a long career as an educator and school administrator in the UK, Coral Milburn-Curtis felt moved to help parents of children who are bullied in school. She wrote a book entitled HOW TO PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM BULLIES, and she created a resource lens (web site) on Squidoo. Bullying is a serious problem, taking a big toll on children's self esteem, and in extreme cases even bringing some children to commit suicide. Very few schools are free of the bullying problem, and according to Milburn-Curtis, very few know to effectively manage the problem.

For a very long time, we‚have heard talk about how schools need to accommodate each student‚has unique learning style. And, now and then, we hear that schools ought to also accomodate each teacher‚has unique teaching style. But as obvious as both of these principles are, very few if any public schools have ever done much to fully address them.

Now, however, there‚has an exciting example of this being done in the Ordrup School just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. The students and the teachers joined with the Bosh & Fjord design company to redesign their school to meet everyone‚has differentiated style and to encourage creativity. There are some great photos on

Some people consider that I’m naive when I call for soft management practices such as servant leadership, open book/stewardship, and appreciative inquiry as the way to transform our schools. And they do this despite the compelling evidence given in my book and in much of management literature showing that organizations that use these practices have sustained high success.

“The ageless essence of leadership is to created an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.”
Peter Drucker

In a school in which the weaknesses are made irrelevant by a strengths-based program, that school will be a happier place and a highly effective learning environment.

The task of aligning strengths in a school can begin with any trim tab action, a simple act that gets the ball rolling and can be initiated by any stakeholder: parent, student, teacher, administrator, support staff, custodial staff, politicians, everybody.

You’ll find several trim tab activities listed in CRISIS IN SCHOOL MANANGEMENT

ETHICAL CHALLENGES AND DEALING WITH THE DEVIL
What would you do if you were asked by someone in your organization to “cook” the numbers and or to do something else unethical? Unethical requests are frequently made in many organizations, and that’s no surprise to organizational consultant Elizabeth Doty.
It happened to her when she worked in the corporate world, and as a consultant she has accumulated over seventeen years of private interviews with people in various organizations. She reports this in an excellent article entitled “Winning the Devil’s Bargain,” in strategy&business’ enews (http://www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews050107).

Frustrated over schools that are failing, some politicians are calling for a longer day and/or a longer school year. Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts and chairman of the education committee, wants a longer day and wants between $50 million and $150 million added to the No Child Left Behind program. He wants a trained corps of teachers help schools address the challenges of a longer day. New York’s Gov. Spitzer is proposing a longer day for trouble schools, as is Gov. Rell of Connecticut, each adding billions to their state’s education budget for this.

What the Washington Nationals and the Chicago Cubs baseball teams have in common with St. Louis and California Schools.

In Crisis in School Management, I quote from Caren Black’s book entitled Get Over It! Education Reform is Dead. Now what? It was published in 2002, and here’s one of the things I quote: “In California alone (America's largest school system), thousands of laws have been passed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent (in the last quarter century).”

In researching for my book Crisis in School Management, I discovered that there are lots (hundreds) of organizations with the mission of reforming our schools. And, after I announced the posting of my draft manuscript on my web site, readers sent in names of even more organizations with the same mission. With so many organizations helping to keep attention on school reform, why are our schools still struggling?