Articles
Between Hope and Despair
Jan 27th
Written by Tom Vander Ark and Tony Wagner
© Tony Wagner, 2000 (first published in Education Week, June 21, 2000)
For most students, high school is a time of life spent precariously between hope and despair. Faced with an increasingly diverse group of teenagers as well as shrinking resources, the American comprehensive More >
Reasons to Learn in the New Village Schoolhouse
Jan 27th
© Tony Wagner, 1999 (first published in School Administrator, December 1999)
Most of us achieve more when we have aim for a higher bar. As a motivator, fear gets us only so far. That will be the big “a-ha” in education a few years from now—fear of not being promoted, fear More >
Reflections on Columbine
Jan 27th
Standards for The Heart?
© Tony Wagner, 1999 (first published in Education Week, May 12, 1999)
Killing classmates is made more imaginable for adolescents by glorified revenge fantasies in the media and video games, and it is easier to accomplish with ready access to guns, but the root cause is neither of More >
From Compliance to Collaboration
Jan 27th
Four Leadership Qualities Needed to Change Schools
© Copyright Tony Wagner, 1998 (first published in Education Week, April 22, 1998)
Despite all the rhetoric about shared decisionmaking, top-down, compliance-driven school leadership still seems to be the norm in many communities. The reason is that most school boards still expect new superintendents to More >
Change as Collaborative Inquiry
Jan 27th
A ‘Constructivist’ Methodology for Reinventing Schools
© Tony Wagner, 1998 (first published in the Phi Delta Kappan, March 1998)
For the last several years, the big push in education reform has been to develop new, more rigorous state and district standards for learning. While the debate continues to rage in many communities More >
Creating Community Consensus On Core Values
Jan 27th
© Copyright Tony Wagner, 1996 (first published in Education Week, October 9, 1996)
A growing number of educators and parents are beginning to see the importance of some kind of values or “character” education. But efforts to impose forms of character education with a predetermined set of values onto students and More >
Prerequisites for ‘Scaling Up’
Jan 27th
© Tony Wagner, 1995 (first published in Education Week, May 24, 1995)
“Higher standards” and professional development have become unifying battle cries of school reformers. Like apple pie, few can oppose efforts to “professionalize” education, but the real questions are: which standards, decided by whom, and assessed how? And professional development More >
Why Charter Schools?
Jan 27th
© Tony Wagner, 1994 (first published in Education Week, June 2, 1994)
While doing research for a book on school reform in three different communities, I came to understand more clearly the difficulties of working for systemic change within large educational bureaucracies. Many of the best principals and teachers practice what More >
Education Week Commentary – October 2004
Jan 26th
Education Week Commentary – October 2004
The Challenge of Change Leadership: Transforming Education Through ‘Communities of Practice’ Published: October 27, 2004
