A story of pebbles and one big boulder.Just as we were going to press with this issue, Leslie Goldring Ford candidly shared another in a continuing series of graphic reminders about one of the superintendency's greatest balancing acts Balancing Acts is a documentary by Donna Schatz that chronicles the lives of Chinese acrobat Man-Fong Tong and his wife Magda Schweitzer, a Jewish acrobat from Budapest, Hungary. The two met in Europe on the eve of World War II. : How do you move a whole school system forward while dealing with the sort of communitywide upheaval that could derail de·rail intr. & tr.v. de·railed, de·rail·ing, de·rails 1. To run or cause to run off the rails. 2. even the strongest transformational plan? Ford is the second-year superintendent in Onteora, N.Y., an 1,800-student school district in the Hudson River Hudson River River, New York, U.S. Originating in the Adirondack Mountains and flowing for about 315 mi (507 km) to New York City, it was named for Henry Hudson, who explored it in 1609. Dutch settlement of the Hudson valley began in 1629. valley, who has contributed a short article (page 39) about challenging individual and collective mental models that could very well affect whether her district can outlast out·last tr.v. out·last·ed, out·last·ing, out·lasts To last longer than. outlast Verb to last longer than Verb 1. its current period of decline. But much of her energies of recent weeks has been channeled toward the aftermath of a horrific murder-suicide involving a school district employee and her husband. The understandable grief of the moment was amplified to dreadful dimensions by the local newspaper's front-page publication of the perpetrator's rambling rambling Neurology Fragmented non-goal directed speech most often caused by acute organic brain disease. See Organic brain disease, Word salad. blog, including sexually explicit details and white separatist white separatist n. One who advocates the creation of a society in which whites live separately from other races or from which nonwhite races are excluded. white separatism n. views. I'm sure Ford will find a way to pull her school community through this crisis. Like most imaginative systems thinkers, she relies on metaphors to drive home key messages. In her piece, she relies on an old Aesop fable, "The Crow and the Pitcher," which suggests meaningful change happens one pebble at a time. As she put it to me: "I believe we collectively have the power to influence behavior in the future and should take the opportunity." I welcome your feedback on her contribution or any of the other systems thinkers represented here. Jay P. Goldman Voice: 703-875-0745 E-mail: jgoldman@aasa.org [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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