“The district’s success comes down to setting a high bar for student achievement, clear planning to help classrooms and students achieve, and smartly aligning resources toward goals, all under steady, focused leadership and a governing board held to account for results – in other words, the same practices that lead to successful individual schools.”

So high expectations–so I assume some effort was made to get teachers and/or parents to invest in the ideas that schools were going to become better. How was this done? Is there a teachers’ union? Did they have a strategy to increase parental involvement in their childrens education? The clear planning and smartly aligning resources–was this the Administration that did this? Was there some outside advisors or consultants? Focused leadership–Who were the leaders? the Principals? the Teachers? Teacher groups? Was there special time set aside in the summer or some other time to strategize on how to make these changes?

Do you think that having the “long list of independent charter schools” was instrumental to their success? Because there are critics who believe that the whole movement of charter schools and vouchers are handcuffing the ability of MPS to succeed.

Interesting article just the same, and important in the sense that there is such a defeatist attitude about MPS, this suggests that big changes are possible.