A few weeks ago I attended a food lifestyle conference at the Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center in Santa Rosa. Here are my notes. In many ways, my lens is through what we do at BPL.

“You are what you eat and you are what you eat, eats” – Wild deer eat in cornfields with genetically modified corn. This is not organic. - the Bigger Picture

How do you make a mouse live longer? Methuselah Study points out that mice that ate fewer calories lived longer. – We should have students count calories in advisory and discuss.

“Walk more watch less TV ”TV kills” – I’m glad we do walk and talks.

“We weigh the salad but not the dressing” – The calories listed on the salad are without adding the dressing, and the calories are in the dressing. Duh! We feel good because we think we are eating healthy but in reality we are being fooled by companies using data to trick us. As a society we insist on data, but we actually pay little attention to why the data maybe wrong and even less attention to changing how we behave once we discover the date is wrong. Once we have the data, how do we really use it to make changes? 

Seventh day Adventists live longer than anyone. Life expectancy is mid-80’s. They are vegetarian. They have their own schools and colleges.

When is 0, not 0? Answer: When we count grams of fat.

“We are allowed to lie.” The front of the PAM spray bottle states, PAM is fat-free but PAM is nothing but fat.  FDA allows companies to lie in writing. Here’s the reason:

“PAM and other oil sprays claim that each serving has 0 grams of fat. But the fact is: the only ingredient in the can is oil, which is 100% fat.

So how could manufacturers say this product is free of fat? They're sneaky. They posted a ridiculously small serving size of .25 grams. That's 120th of an ounce – or one teensy one-quarter-of-a-second squirt.

There isn't much of anything, oil or otherwise, in 120th of an ounce, which manufacturers love because the FDA states they can "round down" ingredients that are less than half a gram to 0. Hence, the food label says 0 grams of fat. But if you eat multiple servings – if you coat an entire skillet with oil spray – you're tallying up multiple calories, all 100% fat.” 

What the data shows you need for a healthy lifestyle:

Time for yourself

Regular exercise

Mindfulness

A healthy way of eating

Renewal back in the groove

Walking an hour for yourself – connects to creativity

Children changing the world:

Dr Rosati, a speaker at the conference from Duke told a story about his grandchild asking about a lobster they were about to eat. He did not want his grandfather to eat it. He said, “I won’t eat it but this won’t change anything about the world eating lobsters.” His grandson looked at him and said, “I just changed you.” This is exactly how children changed their parents smoking habits.



Imagine math and science from the perspective of a middle or high school student. That student’s first image is more than likely that of a textbook—dense, daunting, and dry—accompanied by his or her sigh, “Please, anything but this!” Only the rare student, who already is passionate about the topic, would consider navigating the textbook alone or for pleasure. Truthfully, a theoretical book of formulas and facts has never been the way people have learned science, technology, engineering, and math—what we now refer to as the STEM disciplines. Long before the rules were codified in textbooks, people engaged with these disciplines to exercise one of the defining characteristics of our species: Our ability to construct the things we need to understand and function in our lives. How did we manage to get so far off course, to take something that is so quintessentially human and make it so alien?

Fortunately, there is a quiet revolution—called the Maker Movement—that is deeply rooted in these natural instincts and is unfolding in communities across the country. With the potential to transform STEM learning, the movement has been spurred largely by the success of Make magazine and its creation, Maker Faires.

Who are these makers? In the words of Dale Dougherty, the general manager of Make’s parent company, O’Reilly Media, and the founder of the Maker Faire festivals, they are the people who “look at things a little differently and who just might spark the next generation of scientists, engineers, and makers.” Makers share in the common delight of tinkering, hacking, creating, and reusing materials and technology. They organize themselves into thriving communities to create objects that they are passionate about and to engage others. Maker-spaces are springing up in cities and communities across the country. People can drop in and learn from friends, mentors, and peers. They learn about using 21st-century tools such as computer-controlled table saws, laser cutters, and 3-D printers to create prototypes and fabricate physical objects.

According to Thomas Kalil, the deputy director for policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Maker Movement “begins with the makers themselves—who find making, tinkering, inventing, problem-solving, discovering, and sharing intrinsically rewarding.”

Make magazine started Maker Faire five years ago in San Mateo, Calif. By 2010, the Bay Area Maker Faire—the first of its kind—attracted more than 80,000 people and featured 1,000 makers. The same year, two new venues were added to the roster in New York City and Detroit. World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, or NYSCI, in Queens, drew more than 25,000 visitors and 500 makers, and Maker Faire Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum attracted a crowd of 20,000 visitors.

Innovation, particularly in the STEM fields, has emerged as a rallying cry of the Obama administration. In his April 2009 address to the National Academy of Sciences, the president urged, “I want all of us to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” A recently released report, “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development Networking and Information Technology,” from the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, states that “the problem is not just a lack of proficiency among American students; there is also a lack of interest in STEM fields among many students.” PCAST acknowledges that education is most successful when students and teachers develop personal connections with the ideas and excitement of STEM fields. The maker movement is able to stir this kind of passion and personal motivation that is often lacking in traditional education.

This past fall, in conjunction with World Maker Faire at NYSCI, the National Science Foundation funded a workshop to consider how the maker movement could inform and improve STEM education. Working in collaboration with Tom Kalil and Dale Dougherty, NYSCI convened leaders from foundations and federal agencies; educators; innovators from schools of engineering, architecture, computer science, and multimedia design; entrepreneurs; research scientists; and directors of leading science centers, museums, and arts institutions. This seasoned group reached an important conclusion: The maker movement is not a shiny new toy to be appropriated by education reformers as the next disruptive wave. Rather, it is defined by the characteristics of the maker sensibility: deep engagement with content, experimentation, exploration, problem-solving, collaboration, and learning to learn—the ingredients of effective learning communities. From John Dewey to Theodore R. Sizer, progressive educators have championed these very conditions, urging schools to value depth over breadth, exploration over efficiency, and patience and persistence over acceleration. By creating spaces where individuals can dig deeply into their passions and take time to explore, tinker, and invent with like-minded others, the maker movement affirms the kind of deep learning that matters.

Classroom Support

Providence, R.I.-based Big Picture Learning supports a network of 140 schools that focus on students who have been alienated by traditional schooling—the “dropouts” or the “leavers.” Big Picture uses a methodology known as pops—people, objects, places, and situations—to encourage students to find their interests with a process of "thinkering" to help engage their hands and minds. Boasting a 92 percent graduation rate, Big Picture schools have been recognized by the Obama administration as a successful school model that reduces the dropout rate and prepares students for 21st-century careers.

If we want to teach students how to become makers, we need to consider how to engage teachers. Because there is little in the K-12 culture that fosters the connection between “making” and formal education—from the design of undergraduate teacher-preparation programs to how schools are structured—encouraging a maker mentality presents a major challenge.

Resource Area for Teaching, or RAFT, founded in 1994 and based in San Jose, Calif., is a thriving nonprofit organization whose mission is to help educators transform the learning experience through hands-on education, collaborative activities, and an emphasis on 21st-century learning skills. RAFT currently works with more than 10,000 teachers in classrooms, home-school environments, and after-school or community-based programs. These teachers create compelling classroom approaches through relevant, practical, and concrete investigations.

Community Access

In the months leading up to the 2010 World Maker Faire, NYSCI staged a series of Maker Days. These weekend family programs were collaborations between NYSCI, which helped facilitate the effort, and local maker organizations (including Vision and RePlayground), which provided activities. Together we guided visitors through open-ended tabletop challenges, such as building robotic vehicles, designing buildings, and creating miniature boats. Makers inspired visitors of all ages to innovate, create, and solve problems together. Watching the intergenerational play, family collaboration, and positive feedback from visitors, we were encouraged by the potential of making activities to keep visitors deeply engaged.

Marrying the passion, creativity, and engagement of the maker movement to educational opportunities that exist in formal and informal settings is the injection that stem learning needs. It is working effectively in many places throughout the country. And each one reminds us of the fundamental connection between hand and mind, and doing and reflecting. It is our natural inclination to create as we learn and to learn as we create that is at the heart of this movement.

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“The tug is the drug.” Fisherman

“Learn from the pan.” Cooks

The Pull –“ the mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them.” 

What on-line learning is hoping to accomplish is what video games have done. Through play, gamers have figured out the right combinations of challenge and repetition; sharing and feeling; narrative and improvisation; mystery and surprise; motivation and ownership. Thus far schools have consistently failed to do these combinations with high percentages of students.

Can on-line learning develop the platforms that would get students to do things they may not normally do and practice academics through repetition and challenge?

When players play the game they are in-charge of making decisions and dealing with the consequences in an in the moment environment. So much of school has either too much repetition without challenge or too much challenge without repetition. The result is boredom and low self-esteem for many students. 

It is fairly apparent that the difference is games are play and the ways traditional academics are taught in school violate all of the rules of play. Play is voluntary, not part of ordinary life, unserious, unproductive and uncertain. The French intellectual Roger Caillois called play “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money. Therein lies its utility, as a simulation that exists outside regular life.” Precisely because school bills itself as serious and certain, it becomes the foil. In the hearts, hands and minds of students, it is academics that become a pure waste of time and energy because school lacks what video gamers refer to as the pull of the game. Also, it lacks the game environment where players share an emotional connection that allows the participants to go deeper and practice longer. 

A good example of a game that introduced the element of play to a task that people might not normally do is the Wii Fit fitness game. It has sold over 37 million copies. The game’s inventor Miyamoto is the best and most famous video game inventor. When I read about him, I was happy to hear that the narrative and environment for all of his games comes from his childhood experience of exploring caves and getting “pulled” deeper, further and for longer periods of time into those caves.

The best example I saw of an academic game was the welding simulator. It followed most the rules Miyamoto puts out there. Here the combination of all of the elements of play were mixed in with the practical skills of literacy and numeracy and it was happening all at once where you had to think with your senses and feel with your mind. Yes, it is possible to get better at this combination of practical and academic and assess it by going deeper and practicing longer. This simulator was proof. 

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

 In the last year, I spent a great deal of time pondering how to get reliable data and evaluations on our schools. It seems like everywhere I turned foundations wanted us to have randomized control studies to prove that our schools and practices were working. The Gates Foundation went as far as to tell us that no one will get funding unless they have evaluations that are the gold standard. Last night, I went out to dinner with a childhood friend of mine who is a very eminent scientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I talked with him about what kind of data the departments of education and the foundations want from us but also talked about a discrepancy that is being reported in the scientific community re: how evaluations and scientific experiments are being conducted and replicated where the results are not holding up overtime and causing some catastrophic results in the fields of medicine and ecology. He assured me that real science is replicable and that the errors are in how experiments and tests are being conducted. Yes, he said there are perception biases. In the latest New Yorker, an article by Jonah Lehrer, The Truth Wears Off, summarizes some of the research I’ve been following and calls into question just what we should believe that is being touted as truth through scientific study.

In one memory experiment subjects were shown a face and then told to verbally describe it. Other subjects just viewed the face and didn’t have to verbally talk about what they saw. The subjects that did not verbally describe the face actually recognized the face way more often. This is called verbal overshadowing. Of course a guy like me loves it when the words get in the way of the sensory motor, but over many years of replicating this landmark study, very surprisingly, the results have gotten weaker and weaker…”There was a decline in the effect of the original research.” Schooler, the scientist who became famous for this finding, stated “It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back.” Given our work with students and schools and all of the emphasis put on measurement using randomized control scientific studies as the gold standard I became quite confused and unnerved. There is tens of millions of dollars of funding being handed out because of these studies and according to many of the scientists interviewed in the article our beliefs blind us to the point where the results are wrong. Similarly, studies sanctioned in education have been based more on decision based evidence-making (our beliefs) rather than evidence based decision-making. Even if the latter is put into practice according to this article, the results get skewed overtime. Shish! So what do we do in the face of all of this evidence? Should we keep an open-mind and perhaps believe the studies that we don’t agree with? Maybe, we should just believe only what we want to believe. How much is nature playing a trick on us? I don’t want to get too existential here so I won’t, but we should really sit around and talk about this phenomena perhaps with some of our own evaluators and scientists. There is something floating around here that I’ve been sensing for quite a while. The article ends:

“Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.



“I went back to school to try and understand what I’d been doing all these years.”

 Jay McShann – making to the disciplines vs. disciplines to the making

Jay McShann is classified as a self-taught jazz pianist. But like with most things put to words that’s only a little part of the story. Self-taught is a funny term since he had master mentors and a group of jazz musicians who were constantly learning from one another. I’ve been listening to him for decades. The other day I listened to an interview of Jay McShann conducted by Nancy Wilson. Here are some of the things that came out of that interview.

In order to learn you needed to hang around the other musicians. You needed to persist. You had to be in the right places and keep your eyes wide open. And you had to develop your own style that translates to personalizing standards. His style was in tight on the keyboard instead of stride. As a band leader Jay never imposed a vision. He allowed the musicians to develop a democratic approach to playing with one another. The band was always on the beat but loose. He described swing as pushing and coasting. You can literally here the pushing and coasting. It was his signature, his maker’s mark. He was known for his blues, swing and being one of the last of the whorehouse piano players. Jay never had a manager and always insisted on doing the business himself. He never became monetarily wealthy but was widely known and loved. That’s style and wealth. That’s quality of life vs. standard of living.

This week I was with Kari at a meeting that is the beginning of a network of networks around deeper learning. The meeting was funded by the Hewlett Foundation and organized by a school developer, Envision. I’m finally getting my shovel in deep enough to get what people are hinting at. Deeper Learning has yet to be defined by anyone in the group, but basically it is about going intellectually deeper and persisting.  To this group, this is the preferred style of learning and will prepare young people for the 21xt century. I have many questions about always talking about deeper learning as the proper solution and always pushing students to think more deeply about everything. Sometimes simple and surface is better than deeper. Just like sometimes choking is better than panicking. Should you think deeply all the time? What happens when you think deeply and still can’t solve the problem? What happens when you think deeply and spend too much time on second guessing yourself? Man, did I feel that we spent too much time on lots of things at this meeting. We spent way too much time on some things and spent little time sticking to the agenda. There is a crazy rhythm to life that leaves out many other strategies for learning if it is just deeper learning that you are after. The use of the hand and heart and instincts that are native to all of us that have been developed over a few million years of evolution are discounted here. Words like gut and grit should have their old connotations as well as applications new more abstract situations. This Socratic process only works some of the time to solve problems. Students need to develop a wide range of strategies to assess in the moment which to choose and make good choices. There is something odd to me about choosing deeper over all of the others and make school all about just one. Let’s see where all of this goes. Right now, there isn’t any room in the room.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

syn. hesitant, uncertain, tentative, awkward

This week with the elections, economy, and all I thought a lot about Ralph Caplan’s talks about how we learn from failure; of course that is, if the failure is acknowledged. How do you turn disasters into successes? How do you learn from mistakes?  In one sense, there’s nothing quite like failure to motivate you to succeed. The book Design Disasters: Great Designers Fabulous Failures is filled with stories about failures.  In Ralph’s chapter, Stumbling Is the Cost of Doing Business, there is something in between complete failure and success referred to as stumbling. Stumbling implies not the deep fall but rather having the ability to get up pretty quickly and try again. When you stumble your fall is broken. Here’s the example Ralph uses:

Alan Murray, inventor of the Murray Space Shoe, made a pair of ice skates for me, then taught me how to skate.  The trick," he explained, "is to keep falling and catching yourself on one knee." Sometimes you don't manage to catch yourself until one knee or more has already hit the ice, but the system works, and that seems to be pretty much how kids learn to walk. 

When we don’t know the answers to complex questions, we kind of stumble along. In reality, both political parties and everyone else involved seems to be stumbling but won’t admit it. Their stumbling is probably a good thing and the only thing they can do. The truth is no one knows the answers for a number of good reasons like:

                  It takes time to figure them out and no one has time anymore

                  The answers keep changing as time goes by

                  We want immediate short-term successes with little effort.

The greater problem is that these problems are not easily figured out and the politics of power come into play as an end in itself.

Similarly, the lives of our students and our own are steeped with uncertainty. We are always trying to maintain some stability so; we seek ways to break our falls by ourselves or with the support of others. Stumbling is a strategy to discuss as we work with our students and schools to practice and get better.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.



One of the benefits of a network is that when you put things out there you never know exactly what is going to happen but you know something will. Our schools are in all points of their evolution. In the past few years, some have taken on the work of developing the non-cognitive variables into their learning plans and as part of advisor training. Others have developed relationships with Road Trip Nation. Still others have gotten heavily involved in the Maker Movement.

In the past few weeks, Tarika, a student from Brooklyn who attended the Eat Smart Symposium, has put out her product of the design and fabrication of bags made from scrap pieces cloth to eliminate the use of plastic bags in grocery stores. A project proposal went to Board member Marc Ecko. A call to present at the International Youth Summit on Plastic Pollution and Sustainability in Long Beach, CA, and the BPL student network has created momentum out there where other students from other schools are getting involved. The good thing about our symposiums is that they start with presentations of our students around their interests with adults listening to what they are doing. In this case, another board member Frank Wilson, Lynda, and Tarika’s advisor Erica supported her work and it took off. This is exactly how things should happen and they do. It’s great to see.

When I was in DC two weeks ago, I met Katherine Eckstine at a meeting at the Alliance for Excellent Education. When we were on our way to Union Station, she took a call on Strengthening Schools and Strengthening Families, a recent report about absenteeism in NYC schools. The graph above shows the percentages and numbers of students who are absent from school at elementary, middle and high school in NYC. The numbers of students missing more than a month of school are staggering. The numbers of students missing 10-19 days of school are beyond staggering. Unfortunately, a closer look at the numbers reveals even more sad news. The absences are concentrated in schools with lower income and higher minority populations making the percentages extremely high in some schools that double the percentages of students missing school. This all leads to talks about how can test scores improve so much with so much absence? What has been neglected in the race to increase test scores? If you are not there, you are just not there. In the system we have the pages keep on turning and eventually many students get “pushed out or pulled out.“ The questions these numbers raise show that we are missing productive connections to families and communities. This is something we know something about. The combination of small, personalized and relevant learning coupled with changing roles of teachers leads to greater connectivity to homes and communities. This is something that has to be the core work of a school and part of its culture. Hopefully, reports like this one will make policy makers think about the implications of their policies that are focused solely around test scores.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.”

At our board meeting this week and at the Big Picture Learning event in Newark honoring Mayor Booker there was a great deal of discussion about how such a small organization has had the influence it has had. Many questions came up about the future. Can we keep up and support a network with so few full-time staff? Can we develop more schools and programs? Can we continue to influence education in even more scalable ways? These are all good questions and it is good to have a board that allows us to knock strategies and ideas around. The truth is that we have always been a small group compared to other groups. This has allowed us to be nimble and change quickly. We never wanted to grow the organization to the point where its weight makes it cumbersome. Rather the notion of our practice was to always take on work that was necessary and innovative. We would stay at the edge and resonate with the middle so others would understand they could change.

Like Yoda, we have many allies who help us. There are many people and organizations that are friends and support our work. They help because we actually have a practice that is authentic and honest; that is focused around students; and that students are part of. This is what makes us powerful but many times we are wrongfully judged because of our small size.

Over the years the distribution of our work keeps shifting. We convened AHSI. We ran a national principal leadership organization. We developed longitudinal study designs. We started a college. We ran the first statewide network that involved everyone from superintendents to students and community members. We developed facilities designs and entrepreneurial centers. We have our own network of schools nationally and internationally. All the while, the work we did informed our work in our network of schools and informed work done by others that does not have our brand on it but certainly has our mark, the maker’s mark.

It is difficult to describe in a day at a board meeting and an event what of our past or how our future is going to look. We don’t lack the paper to make more business plans and strategies. These are on our agenda to produce but the most important thing is that we always make a practice that truly reflects those plans and visions. This is what we have done so well.

All that stated our students were once again the most powerful and impressive part of the event. Their stories and their insights gave our audience lots to think about. Through our students, people begin to understand why we are successful with students who had all sorts of difficulties in school. Dan Pink's comments were focused and timely. His critique of the continuing carrot and stick mentality of our system with its narrow band of assessing learning has dire consequences for our nation’s health. He pointed out how our educational leaders continue to say one thing and do another.  They continue to ignore the data that is pointing routine cognitive learning will only get you so far in the world we are moving toward.  It was great to hear Dan make his points and make the connections to how we are doing what the scientific research is really saying.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

*Foster a relaxed corporate culture and encourage creative thinking.

*We must say close to innovations happening in the academic community.

Principles of Pixar’s culture

The work that Pixar does and the culture they create in is a great expectation for us. Their corporate culture and the innovative products they create go hand in glove. At Pixar, staff regularly write academic papers describing their techniques. On the other side, academic types are looking at Pixar’s culture and taking out lessons learned to inform their work and the work of other organizations. This “publishing may give away ideas but it keeps us connected with the academic community. This connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed. It helps us attract exceptional talent.” Here’s a direct correlation to Leonardo Fioravanti, the Professor of Secrets and Pixar. Leonardo made it his life’s work to publish secrets of all the trades, arts and sciences. This is Renaissance thinking and thinking that changes the world.

Last night I met with Phil Price in DC. We had a great chat about his next steps in learning the world of business for the sake of improving the lives of young people. Not many of his peers at the business school where he is getting his MBA are attending school for the reasons Phil is attending. As he explained to me most of them would say that they are motivated by their passions but mostly motivated around doing what they want to do because what they did before was not fulfilling. Phil told me that he thinks of me as a professor without a college. He pointed out that I write papers, I talk, and I have students. I guess I’m the travelling professor.  Shades of a piece of Pixar’s culture.

Another point that is made in the article about Pixar was that “management’s job is to build the capability to recover when failures occur. When Disney bought up Pixar, it allowed them to preserve their innovative culture while bringing value to the larger company.”  This is a great story for BPL. It may be that one day BPL becomes BPL Inside of some company where we can have more influence and scale. All of this is food for thought about our next five years and our upcoming board meeting.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.

Everyone in my Brooklyn neighborhood had a nickname. This was no small matter but what really didn’t matter was if it meant anything. In this case and for no reason whatsoever, everyone called the window-washing man Davey Crockett. All of these peculiar neighborhood characters had ways of being with expressions that identified them. In Davey Crockett’s case, he would ask for a glass of ice water every time he came into an apartment to wash the windows. He would always say to my mom, “My Sarah, get me a glass of water.” and my mom would always say, "I don’t need you to wash my windows today.” He didn’t care what she said. He walked in and did them anyway.

His other expression was the one I’m landing on today. Every time he’d see me he’d say, “The things you see on the streets these days.” I never knew why he said it but he said it every time. Well, this week it struck home. I was on the streets and saw loads of people. I had dinner with John Deasy in LA. John is in line to be the next superintendent in LA. Our meeting went 3 hours. It was great to catch up and listen to his problems. You would think they would be the same as ours but they were very different. He is dealing with so much incompetence at every level of the district. We will continue to meet and figure out how we work in Los Angeles.

Before meeting with John I met with Shelly Weston. Shelly is directing CTE in LA. We can do quite a bit of work here with her projects. I also stopped in off the street and met with David Abel. David was great. He pushed me around...or rather, pushed my ideas around. I got clearer and smarter about framing things in my home state of California.

After LA, I caught a flight to San Francisco, and because my meeting in Seattle with the Gates Foundation was cancelled, I got to stay three days at meeting at the Stupski Foundation instead of two. This was great because I had the opportunity to catch-up with Ted Fujimoto, Susan Colby, and Larry Rosenstock. I also connected with Rick Hess and we are going to continue talking about policy and program evaluation. I have to admit it was very interesting to be part of the work of an operational foundation. This was something new for me. The Stupski Foundation’s plan to roll out their Next Generation Learning strategy in Maine, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Ohio, New York, and West Virginia is ambitious. These states were chosen for the most part because of their commissioners. The Council of Chief State School Officers is in partnership with Stupski. Although I’m not sure about all of these states, I understood the power of an operational foundation having the capital to buy, lever resources, and lead an initiative. It’s something I wish we had more of - be that funds or leverage.

While I was walking along the streets of San Francisco, I ran into Dennis. We got caught up over dinner and the following night I had dinner with Mario. I know this sounds crazy, but when I can randomly meet up with our people on the road in a city, I know we are doing something right. The next day Amber Kim flew into work with our new school in San Francisco.

At Stupski my talks with Ted Fujimoto were great. Ted is probably doing the most varied work out there. He is connected to Hollywood and is putting together a movie that will involve our schools and school visits around an initiative he is starting called The Right to Succeed.

So, the streets were full this week. Next week, I walk the streets of DC. It seems that everyone who was in San Francisco this week is heading for DC. I have meetings after my meetings as follow-up meetings with the same people I was in San Francisco with. It is a movable feast. This also includes Dennis. He’ll be in DC as well, and as usual, at different meetings from me.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions.