On reading "What is teacher tenure?"

I have a respond to what I was reading just now. The article entitled as "What is teacher tenure?" gives an idea to search what is the meaning of tenure. I got it here:

Definitions of tenure on the Web:

• the term during which some position is held
• give life-time employment to; "She was tenured after she published her book"
• the right to hold property; part of an ancient hierarchical system of holding lands
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have their position terminated without just cause.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure
• Tenure is a 2009 American comedy film, written and directed by Mike Million and starring Luke Wilson, David Koechner and Gretchen Mol. The film was produced by Paul Schiff and released by Blowtorch Entertainment as their first original production.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(film)
• Land tenure is the name given, particularly in common law systems, to the legal regime in which land is owned by an individual, who is said to "hold" the land. The sovereign monarch, known as The Crown, held land in its own right. All private owners are either its tenants or sub-tenants. ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(law)
• a status of possessing a thing or an office; an incumbency; a period of time during which it is possessed; a status of having a permanent post at an academic institution; a right to hold land under the feudal system; To grant tenure, the status of having a permanent academic position, to (someone)
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenure
• As defined in the Collective Agreement: continuing employment, ie all employment other than fixed-term and casual, for an academic staff member's appointment following the tenurable period.
  www.adelaide.edu.au/policies/glossary/
• the conditions of occupancy of a piece of land.
  www.tuition.com.hk/geography/t.htm
• A system of due process and employment guarantee for teachers. After serving a two-year probationary period, teachers are assured continued employment in the school district unless carefully defined procedures for dismissal or layoff are successfully followed. (Ed Source)
  williams.schoolwisepress.com/smart/dict/dict6.html
• Essential for the protection of academic freedom, faculty tenure is, at its core, a presumption of competence and continuing service that can be overcome only if specified conditions are met. ...
  www.aaup.org/AAUP/about/mission/glossary.htm
• Tenure is the system of holding land or property. It does not equate to ownership since, unlike goods, land cannot be possessed by one person in absolute ownership.THEME A data layer relating to a specific subject or topic of interest.
  www.thelist.tas.gov.au/docs/glossary/glossary.html
• To hold, possess, or occupy. The mode of holding land All land in Australia and the United Kingdom that has been granted by the Crown, even that in fee simple, is held by tenure rather than by absolute ownership, as the Crown alone is the source of all tenure. ...
  www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/nt_report/ntreport05/app1.html
• is from 4pm on the day of arrival to 10am on the day of departure (9.30 am for props 22 and 85). The customer undertakes to keep the premises and all furniture, fittings and effects in or on the premises in the same state of repair and condition as at the commencement of the holiday and also ...
  www.cornishcottagesonline.com/content/terms.html
• the method whereby land rights are held.
  www.eurogeographics.org/documents/toledo_terminology_bl_15Nov05.ppt

Special Edition Spread the Word

Special Edition Spread the Word

“Bullying at School and Online” e-Book

A free downloadable e-Book full of quick facts for parents and educators to reference. Print the e-Book out to share, or copy the code from the box on the right to add a link to this e-Book on your website.

Download the e-book for free

Anti-Bullying Fliers

More than half of all kids are directly involved in bullying. This flier has 10 things you can do now to help. Print them out and share with family, friends, teachers, or school administrators.

Download Anti-Bullying Flier in English

Let Kids Be Kids | Education.com

Let Kids Be Kids | Education.com

Nothing defines childhood like play. Here's how to get out of your child's way and let them be kids.

What You Need To Know

While adults have tried throughout history to manipulate how children play, kids always come out on top. According to Howard P. Chudacoff, Ph.D., even before the modern dilemma of children with no free time for unstructured play, adults have tried to put their own agendas on children's play.

The 7 Biggest Challenges of a Manager — MakingITclear®

The 7 Biggest Challenges of a Manager — MakingITclear®

1. Achieving a Stretch Goal
The organization you’re managing is responsible for something — whether it’s performing a business process, supporting some other organization, developing a new product, or getting new customers. There are goals associated with your objectives, and if your organization is aggressive then those goals require more than the typical amount of effort. It’s going to take some careful planning for you to figure out how to apply your organization’s people and resources to achieve an aggressive goal. You’re going to have to motivate people, remove roadblocks from their path, and focus them on the things that are most important. It’s a stretch goal, but you can achieve it — maybe even surpass it.

2. Bringing Out the Best in Your Employees
All employees have good days and bad days. Some of the causes are out of your control. But it’s important that you take steps to make as many days as possible “good days.” Here are some of the things that you can do:

• Treat every employee with respect. If you have praise for the employee, give the praise in front of coworkers. If you have criticism for the employee, give it in private. For all but the worst underperforming employees, make sure that the praise happens much more often than the criticism.
• Help employees align their personal goals with their work goals. Talk with each employee about his or her personal goals: what they want to get out of life, where they want their career to go. To the extent possible, use this information to help you allocate work assignments.
• Provide a work environment that is appropriate for the work and conducive to employee well-being. A comfortable work environment makes your employees more productive.
• Encourage employee communication and cooperation. For example, in one of my management jobs, I held a monthly lunch for my employees. During the lunch I updated them on any company news I’d heard, and I had some of the employees describe their recent work and some of their challenges. We also had a series of awards.
  But these were not your typical awards. Each award was given by the previous award recipient to someone who exemplified the spirit of the particular award. There was a “Gumby” award (a Gumby character) given to the most flexible employee, and other awards for things like putting the team ahead of yourself, most creative outside-the-box idea, and unluckiest employee. Employees sometimes even created their own one-time awards when something special or unusual happened. Over time the number of awards grew, and the interchange of enthusiasm and ideas made the organization a happy and fun place to work.

3. Dealing with Underperforming Employees
Not all of your employees will do their best. Some will have personal issues that interfere with their work. Technically it’s not your problem, but in reality any issue that contributes to an underperforming employee is your problem. You’ll help employees cope with personal issues, you’ll provide motivation and counsel, maybe steer them to appropriate resources inside or outside your company. You’ll “carry” your underperforming employees to a point, and then beyond that point you’ll have to ease them out of your organization. You’ll be humane, but you have to balance the needs of the organization with the needs of the employees.

4. Dealing with Outstanding Employees
Some of your employees obviously outperform the others. That’s good news for your organization, but it presents its own set of challenges. Outstanding employees need special treatment. You want them to keep doing an exceptional job but that usually means that you’ll have to pay them special attention. They need recognition for their talents and efforts. They need encouragement, training and guidance. And above all they need to know that they have a career path in your company, even if that career path takes them out of your organization.

You’ll be tempted to hold on to your outstanding employees and keep them from being promoted out of your organization. You shouldn’t do that. When an employee star outgrows your organization, the best thing for your company is to make sure that the employee finds a home in another part of your company where he or she can continue to contribute. And ultimately, you’ll be rewarded for your good deed of helping the employee achieve his or her potential. Your reputation as a “team player” and good manager will grow, and your own career will be enhanced.

5. Hiring the Right People
No matter how happy your employees are, you’ll get occasional turnover. And if your organization is successful then you’ll often find that your budget and headcount will grow as you are assigned more and more responsibility. Either way, you’ll need to hire. Hiring is easy, but hiring the right person is extremely difficult.

The trick in hiring is to get an understanding of how an employee will actually perform the work — not just how the employee does in interviews. Interviews are seldom a good predictor of work and work habits, so going beyond the interview is crucial.

I’ve sometimes used unconventional interviewing techniques. I’ve done the traditional interview, but then I’ve tried some things that gave me a better feel for how the interviewee will perform in an actual work situation. For example, for some programmer positions, I had the prospective employee spend some time with his/her future coworkers, going through a task that the current employee was doing. Getting feedback from the current employee (who had a vested interest in finding someone who would carry a part of the workload) made a big difference in our choice for some potential new hires. And the process also increased our acceptance rate for job offers, since the job applicants had a better feel for the environment into which they were being hired.

6. Responding to a Crisis
No matter how much planning you do, things will go wrong. An employee will get sick at a critical time. A weather disaster will hit your facility and disrupt your plans. A crime will be committed — maybe a theft or even something that harms an employee.

Planning is a part of managing, but perhaps more important is a manager’s ability to change plans on the fly in response to changing conditions. When a crisis hits, you have to be able to deal with it — calmly, quietly and without being overwhelmed by stress.

7. Continuous Improvement
No matter how good your organization gets, it can do better. There’s always some type of improvement that can be made: a change in a process, a better working environment, better employee motivation, more focus on the essentials. If you ever get to the point where you honestly have no idea how to improve things further, then you should either (a) seek outside advice, or (b) look for another job. There’s always a better way, and you have to keep looking for it.

Conclusion
Management is complicated. It requires skill and motivation. But most of all it requires commitment — the commitment needed to rise to these seven challenges.

A Manager’s Biggest Burden, and 5 Ways to Deal with It — MakingITclear®

A Manager’s Biggest Burden, and 5 Ways to Deal with It — MakingITclear®


One of the biggest surprises to new managers is the intense pressure to keep people working productively.

Doing the wrong thing can be very expensive, and the pressure to properly use your burn rate is intense.

5 Ways to Deal with the Problem
So how do you minimize the wasted time and money? Here are some tips:

1. Don’t give people just one thing to do — give them a view of what comes next. If you give people one thing to do, then they are likely to do it and then “take a break” before asking you what to do next. If they see a stream of work instead of an individual task, then they’re more likely to finish one task and then start right up with the next one.

Even better, if people know the sequence of things they have to do, then they’ll take advantage of natural “waits” in their current task (waiting on someone else, waiting on resources, waiting on a scheduled event) to get some preliminary work done on their next task. This will increase their overall productivity.

2. Make sure that you properly prioritize the work that is to be done. When given multiple task assignments, it’s human nature to spend time on the tasks that are easier or more fun, putting off the other tasks until later. But if employees know the priorities associated with the tasks, and if you insist on them working on higher priority tasks before lower priority tasks, then they’ll stay focused on the work you want them to do.

3. Keep the number of tasks in front of each person to a reasonable number. While you might know all of the things that a person will do for months in advance, it will only confuse and distract a person if you assign all of those tasks at the same time. There’s no best number for how many tasks to give a person, but you generally want to stick to single digits (i.e., 2 to 9 tasks), and lower numbers (2 to 5) are better. The actual number should depend on how much wait time will be associated with doing each task.

4. Have a “standby list” of tasks that can be assigned when there’s nothing else to do. Some of these tasks may be non-critical maintenance tasks that can be done whenever resource is available. This standby list is important because you never know when an entire project might be put on hold, and then you can assign the standby list while you’re figuring out what your organization is going to do next.

5. Use “pull management” instead of “push management.” In pull management you assign a task objective, tell your worker how success will be measured, and then turn your worker loose on achieving the objective, essentially “pulling” the worker toward the objective. In push management you micromanage, keep the employee in the dark as to the true objective, and just give the employee enough task instruction to tell them specifically what to do, “pushing” toward the objective.

With push management the employee will keep coming back to you for detail after detail, and productivity will be wasted while the employee is waiting for your feedback. With pull management you’ll need to do a little more communication up front when you’re defining the objective and the measurement, but the employee will be largely self-sufficient during the performance of the task. Employee productivity is much higher using pull management, and business results are usually better.

Conclusion
There’s nothing worse for an organization, for a business, or for a manager than to have employees who are idle because they don’t have anything to do. The meter is running constantly for business organizations, and every hour lost is an hour that you’ll never get back. Dealing with high organizational burn rates is a manager’s biggest burden, but proper management can minimize wasted burn rate and maximize employee productivity.

8 Attributes of an Ideal Boss — MakingITclear®

8 Attributes of an Ideal Boss — MakingITclear®

The first part of January is time for the annual introspection exercise known as resolution making. Many of us will take a hard look at ourselves and try to focus on ways in which we can improve our lives. Some of us will take a particularly hard look at our jobs: Are we happy in our current job? Should we look elsewhere for a different job?

One of the key factors in our job happiness or unhappiness is our relationship with our boss – the person to whom we report in our company’s organization chart. A good boss can make a bad job tolerable or even enjoyable, and a bad boss can turn an otherwise gratifying occupation into a miserable experience.

Take a minute or two to think about your own boss. How does he or she rate in the following categories?

1. Understanding
There are a lot of different aspects of understanding. First off, does your boss relate to you as a person or are you just a cog in the machine? Boss-to-employee personal relationships are tough to do successfully. In an ideal relationship, the boss values you for your contributions to the business but recognizes that you are an individual and so you have individualized needs. An ideal boss understands your skills and capabilities, but also understands your individual goals and objectives – both in your career and in your personal life.

A second aspect of this factor is the boss’s understanding of where your organization fits into the “big picture” of the company, how it’s supposed to contribute to the business, and how to make that happen. Good bosses also have an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses, and they know how to create an organization of individuals that is stronger than any one individual.

Another aspect of understanding is the boss’s understanding of the work you do. It’s not unusual for a boss to be managing a business function that he has never done himself, nor does she have any idea how the work is performed. It takes a very special boss to be successful in managing such an environment.

2. Flexibility
The worst bosses are like those cheap little battery-operated toy cars you buy for your kids: they only go one direction, and if something gets in their path they just bang up against the obstacle until the obstruction moves (if it ever does). People like this are very difficult to work for. They don’t listen to your objections or ideas for improvement; they just continue to try to get all of their employees to do things the “right” way (i.e., the way the boss has always done it).

A good boss is flexible enough to understand that there is more than one route to success. Good bosses know the difference between giving you an assignment and telling you how to carry it out. They’ll help you when you need assistance, but they won’t force you to follow their way of doing things.

The flexibility also extends to personal considerations. Flexible bosses know that the most important thing about your work is that the job gets done. They know that your prompt arrival at the official start of the business day isn’t that big a deal as long as it doesn’t interfere with your results, nor does it matter what you wear as long as it isn’t disruptive. Flexible bosses understand that personal issues sometimes require you to take unscheduled time off from work, although they expect that you’ll be mature enough to find someone else to take over any pressing responsibilities.

3. An Insulator
I once heard of a manager who described his job this way, “I absorb uncertainty.” What he meant was that he acts as an insulator between his own boss and the people who work for him. When higher management seems to be vacillating on the best approach to take on a given subject, a good boss will insulate his employees from the confusion, keeping them headed in a consistent direction until there’s reason to change that direction. Similarly a good boss will absorb uncertainty from her employees, passing upward in the organization a consistent unified view even if the employees are not in total agreement.

4. A Conductor
Unlike electrical devices, a boss has to be a conductor as well as an insulator. This is the idea of conductor in the transmission sense – someone who passes messages downwards from upper management and upwards from employees. The real skill in this area is knowing when to conduct and when to insulate. Judgment is obviously required, as is the skill to summarize information and clarify things that aren’t clear to begin with.

Of course a good boss is also a conductor in the musical sense of the word; someone who optimizes the performances of individuals to produce a result that is much bigger and better than the sum of the individual contributions. This skill starts with understanding the capabilities of the individuals, and includes the ability to fit the individual skills, aptitudes and motivations together into something that creates a performance worthy of praise.

5. Clear about expectations for what you should do
I’ve worked for bosses who are never specific or complete in their assignments. They neglect to reveal important information – like the fact that the result of a big project has already been promised to customers for next month. I think these bosses are ashamed of the situation, but rather than to face the problem head-on, they figure they will “just see how you do” and then maybe a miracle will happen.

Good bosses are very clear about expectations: both their own and those that have been imposed upon them from higher up the organization chart. Good bosses are honest about what has been requested, and they’re willing to discuss requirements openly and negotiate them where possible.

6. Helps you prioritize
When requirements are clearly overwhelming, and there’s more to do than you can possibly handle, a good boss doesn’t just say “do it all.” Instead, she tells you what’s important and what can wait, thereby giving you the flexibility to focus on the most important things without undue stress.

7. Listens
Underlying many of the other attributes I’ve already mentioned is a listening attitude. Listening is more than just hearing what you say; it’s understanding both the text and the subtext of your message, empathizing with your point of view, and responding in a way that shows you that the boss cares about your situation.

8. Clear about what you have to do to get to your next career goal
Last but not least, a good boss should understand where you want to go with your career, and should help you take steps to move in that direction. For example, if you’re a technician and you want to move into management, then a good boss will help you recognize the skills that you’ll need and will help tailor some of your assignments to build those skills.

Career planning in business is usually associated with performance reviews, but the American annual performance review is mostly a joke, albeit one with a huge impact on your salary. A useful performance review should happen whenever it’s appropriate – after a project is completed, after you’ve done something particularly good, after you’ve done something particularly bad, but probably not on a certain calendar date. Useful performance reviews hold up two yardsticks to your work: one that measures you against the expectations of your current job and another one that measures you against your personal expectations for career growth. The measuring is done jointly by your boss and yourself, and it’s important that there be a two-way communication: you have to understand how your boss feels and your boss has to understand how you feel.

Conclusion
I’ve never had an ideal boss, although I’ve had a few who were good in most of the categories. Think about how your own boss measures up to the criteria I’ve defined here. Then consider four more things:

1. Are you being fair in your measurement, or are you refusing to communicate with your boss in some of these areas? Are you part of the problem?
2. How would you measure up as an employee using the same eight criteria in reverse (i.e., are you understanding, flexible, etc.?)
3. How do you think your boss would rate your boss’s boss? There’s a top-down effect here; if your boss’s boss doesn’t treat your boss fairly then it makes it harder for your boss to treat you fairly.
4. If you’re a boss yourself, then how would your own employees rate you?

Finally, if you’re feeling brave or just confident, forward this article to your boss and your employees to start an interesting discussion.

Harwell’s Unfortunate Laws of Human Organizational Behavior — MakingITclear®

Harwell’s Unfortunate Laws of Human Organizational Behavior — MakingITclear®

1. People always try to use their experience even if it doesn’t apply to the current situation.
2. If someone is brought in as the new manager of an organization, then the new manager will feel obligated to change the organization. Otherwise, what value is the manager contributing?
3. If a manager doesn’t know how to improve an organization, then he/she will change it to look like the last organization that he/she remembers.
4. Either things in an organization will get better or things will get worse. If things get better, then the manager will be rewarded, regardless of whether the manager is responsible for the improvement. If things get worse, then the manager will move on to another organization to try again.
5. Sometimes things in an organization get a little better before they get a lot worse. If the manager is lucky, then he/she will be promoted to a better job before things start to get worse. Of course, then the cycle will start all over again.
6. Rarely, a new manager will actually ask the employees what should be improved. If the employees understand how their organization contributes to the company’s overall performance, then they will undoubtedly provide a better answer than the manager’s experience.
7. Sometimes the manager will hire a consultant. The consultant will then ask the employees what should be improved, and the result will be put into a PowerPoint® presentation, then ignored by the manager.
8. Good organizations will continue to get better until someone in higher management decides they’re not good enough. Then they’ll get worse.
9. Bad organizations will continue to get worse until a new manager tries an idea which should have been obvious from the beginning.
10. If a company contains multiple similar organizations, then they will always be compared, but the true differences will not be discovered. The good organizations will get worse as a result of the comparison, and the bad organizations will get worse as well.

How Do You Feel About School?

If you're like just about every other kid, you're probably a little nervous and excited about the first day. To help battle the butterflies fluttering in your stomach, it might help to bring a favorite pencil or wear a special outfit on the first day. Lots of kids feel pressure to buy a new outfit for the start of the school year, but the real trick is just to be comfortable. Wear your favorite pair of jeans or that funky T-shirt you got on vacation this summer. Every time you look down, it's a guaranteed smile.

If your school requires that you wear a uniform, wear your favorite bracelet or watch - or something else that you really like! What if you hate school by the end of day one? Teachers recommend giving things some time to sort themselves out - once you know your way around the building and are used to the school-day routine, you'll probably feel better. If you still have those feelings after a couple weeks, be sure to talk to your mom or dad or your teacher about how you're feeling. It might also help to talk to the guidance counselor at your school to discuss your feelings. It's the guidance counselor's job to help make school a good experience for you.

 Packing Your School Bag

Some teachers mail a specific list of supplies (such as pencils, notebooks, and erasers) to your house over the summer so that you'll know what you need to bring with you. Start with this list of basic stuff and add to it whatever else you think will help make the school day a bit easier - a pocket dictionary to check your spelling or a few dollars to buy an emergency lunch in the school cafeteria, for example. The most important tip about backpacks is to pack them the night before to prevent last-minute morning panic. Check to make sure that you'll have everything you'll need for the day, especially your homework and gym clothes.

Packing a Lunch

Maybe your school offers healthy lunches in the cafeteria, but there will always be a day here and there when you don't like what's on the menu. Packing your lunch can give you just as many options as the cafeteria, and this way you'll know for sure that you'll like your lunch. To get your fruits and veggies, ask your mom or dad to cut up whatever's in season and put it in single-serving containers. Good choices include oranges, pineapple, grapes, carrots, broccoli, and cucumbers. Include a container of salad dressing for veggies or peanut butter for dipping apple slices. Think lunch has to be a bologna sandwich or a thermos of chicken noodle soup? Not anymore! Wraps made with tortillas and bean dips, extra slices of vegetable pizza left from dinner, and cold spaghetti are healthy favorites - and are as fun as a sandwich. To find healthy lunches in the cafeteria, look for baked rather than fried items (like a baked potato instead of french fries) and avoid salty or high-fat picks like chips, cookies, ice cream, and whole-fat milk. Go for skim milk, fruit, or frozen yogurt instead.

If You Get Sick at School

Who hasn't gotten sick to their stomach at school, a fever, or taken a tumble on the playground that resulted in a bloody scrape? If this happens to you, talk to your teacher or the school nurse about what to do. The school nurse and your teacher can handle minor injuries and headaches, but they will call your parents or guardians if they think you need to see your doctor or go home to bed. Most schools ask for a note from your mom or dad if you miss school due to illness. You can usually get notes from your teacher to cover any work you missed while you were out sick, or you can ask a buddy to pick up an extra copy of any handouts and take notes in class for you. If you feel up to it, try to read your school books while you rest, but if you don't - that's OK. School can wait - it's more important that you take care of yourself.

Tips for Making School Cool

Follow these tips to prepare the way for a successful all the days that follow:

• Get enough sleep so you'll be able to stay awake in class.
• Eat a balanced breakfast to give you the energy you'll need.
• Try to go to school with a positive attitude every day (although it's OK to have a blue funk sometimes).
• Give school your best effort.
• Develop good work habits. That means writing down your assignments and turning in your homework on time.
• Take your time with assignments in and out of the classroom. If you don't understand something, ask the teacher.
• Keep a sense of humor. One teacher we know shows his new students a picture of himself graduating high school - a grinning ape in a red graduation cap and gown. This usually makes the kids laugh, and it's a good way to remind them that school is fun!

A School's Success Can Be Measured in Smiles

When I was getting started in school, my family moved back and forth, from the East Coast to the West, almost every other year. By the time I was in fourth grade, I had switched schools three times and was pretty good at sizing up new learning environments.

My conclusion? Schools were tough places for new kids. While teachers and principals were generally friendly and considerate, they were too busy to help with the hard part: breaking the ice with the other kids.

Bus drivers were another story. They saw and heard every day what we newbies were up against, the veteran-on-rookie teasing and chilly stares that were kept under wraps when teachers and principals were around.

One driver, Mr. Jackson, having noted my teary state through the first week of first grade, took pity on me, pulled me aside, and quietly imparted some strategic social advice I have held on to ever since: Take a deep breath. Do your best to smile at everybody you see on this bus and in your class no matter what they do or say. When someone smiles back, walk over, introduce yourself, and stick with that kid.

For me, the smile came early in the second week. The boy's name was Dick, and he let me tag around with him. He later introduced me to his friends, and first grade turned out fine.

Today, I still look for that first smile every time I walk into a school. Which brings me to YES Prep North Central, in Houston. Serving grades 6-12, this public charter school is the focus of the first installment of our new Edutopia series, Schools That Work.

When I entered the halls of YES Prep, a predominantly Latino school in an economically struggling section of north-central Houston, not only did almost every kid flash a genuine smile, many of them came over, shook my hand, and introduced themselves to me. Somewhere, Mr. Jackson was smiling, too.

Most of the students at YES Prep trace their family roots back to Mexico. All of them have committed themselves to achieving something few, if any, of their family members have even dreamed of: They have pledged to graduate from this school, enroll in a four-year college, and earn a degree.

That is the mission guiding all five YES Prep campuses in Houston; it is the goal uniting a remarkable community of administrators, teachers, parents, business leaders, and Houston Independent School District board members that support those schools. With a young teacher corps that spares no effort to engage students in critical thinking and analysis, and a discipline system that is tough, rigorous, and rooted in love and respect for every student, YES Prep is a model for what school communities can achieve if all the stakeholders commit to a common cause and credo.

"Whatever It Takes" is the story of how YES Prep is changing the lives of families in Houston while slowly transforming the future of public education in the nation's fourth-largest city. It begins on page 20 of this magazine and unfolds further online, with extensive video and interactive coverage. In the months to come, we will profile other blueprint schools whose successes offer new and multiple opportunities for breakthrough change in diverse school districts throughout the nation.

When you visit our YES Prep North Central coverage on the Web, don't miss the new Edutopia.org groups and discussions hosted there. The launch of these opportunities marks the most ambitious expansion of the Edutopia.org online experience since we created the site 15 years ago. Fill out a quick and simple profile, and participate in discussions with other educators and with Edutopia.org bloggers, as well as the administrators, teachers, and families of YES Prep. It's free, and it takes less than five minutes to get started.

As we continue to develop our next generation of community tools, you will be able to connect with other members by grade level, by geographic region, or around core topics like project learning, technology integration, and social and emotional learning.

For it all to succeed, we need your feedback. Tell us the groups and discussions you'd like to see on the site. Tell us the functions you want added to your profile page. Meanwhile, stay tuned to our Foundation blog for updates as we build the tools to enable you to start your own groups and discussions, share more content, and connect with more people.

Finally, I want to call your attention to our cover package, in which we focus on ambitious projects around the country to make schools greener, healthier, smarter, and more sustainable. We found a wealth of energetic folks, creative strategies, and cutting-edge products dedicated to the environmental safety of future generations. This work never ends, and neither does our respect and admiration for the people who do it. You know who you are. We thank you.