The Ongoing Saga of Educational Crisis

I've just read about Paul Vallas, Superintendent of New Orleans Recovery School District and his plan to reconstruct the school district's devestation after Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec07/nola_10-02.html

My thoughts on the matter is that this man is taking on a huge task. Although his intentions are valiant, officials in the city have changed hands too many times. Being a superintendent of two large city school systems, Chicago, with 414,000 students, and Philadelphia, with 172,000 does help but he comes with little experience with recovery efforts even though New Orleans is a smaller school district.

In response to the Edutopia video on the New School Deveopment Group, with the limited information I was given, I was pleased to see that the schools were selling their ideas to recruit students and that families were given choices. I am a firm supporter of out of the box thinking as long as there is theory to back up the processes (i.e montessouri, Piaget, Gardner, Vygotsky). It is refresing to know that efforts are always underway to promote growth in economically disadvantaged areas.

Taking what I know about theory and experience, I feel that the best way for change to take place is collaboration. One cannot micromanage the responsibility as some administrators I know do. This superintendent in New Orleans cannot hide in the shadows, he needs to get involved in the community and lead by example and get his administration to do the same. I guess you would call this a constructivists approach. Take what you know, build on it and make it better.

I would be interested in learning of New Orlean's conquests with the school district and if tleaps and bounds were made. I'd also like to see the media exploit such accomplishments. I'm soo tired of hearing about homicides, accidents, fires, negative war campaigns, etc. A mother of two small children, it is depressing to see what the media portrays these days, the news needs to be more optimistic (sorry to be off on a tangent.) That's what I'd like to leave you with for now.