IMPROVING SCHOOLS FROM WITHIN: Teachers, Parents, and Principals Can Make a Difference

A heartening antidote to the current doom and gloom about public education. Barth envisions the school as a ""community of learners,"" where all involved--parents, students, teachers, administrators--structure the curriculum and the learning environment and continue to evolve as learners themselves. In his excellent Run School Run (1980), Barth wrote of his experiences as a school principal and how they shaped his educational philosophy. Here, he draws on the knowledge gained from his years before the mast as teacher, principal, and Harvard professor, and focuses on bettering the many (often adversarial) relationships between teachers and principal; school and community; school and university, using the principal as fulcrum and ""head learner"" instead of enforcer of school-board decisions. Barth stresses the importance of collegiality: teachers and administrators seeing each other at work, discussing, writing, and thinking about their own learning and practices in order to plan a school that realistically reflects the values and goals of its participants, and provides a culture of learning that is continually improving. Succinct, articulate, and insightful, Barth's own vision of the school as fruitful training ground for lifelong learning.