Schlechty shows both educators and parents how to envision reform and design quality educational systems. He explains how the visioning process must be rooted in real shared beliefs, how mission statements must unpack visions into concrete goals that are connected to action, and how the results of reform can be usefully assessed. Drawing on the author's vast experience in the day-to-day work of implementing school reform, Inventing Better Schools offers new approaches for setting standards and ensuring accountability--and includes samples of actual mission statements and strategic plans of...

-Once again, Phil Schlechty demonstrates why I consider him to be one of the clearest minds in American education. He knows how important public education is to our democracy and has real ideas for making it better. This book is a must-read for policymakers at any level and for those who think and care about school improvement.-
--Paul D. Houston, executive director, American Association of School Administrators

-Schlechty shares leading-edge insights and offers practical guidance to anyone who affects student learning. His suggestions are wonderful dialogue starters for...

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty--one of the nation's best-known experts on leadership and change in schools--offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools. Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of the school's organizational culture3/4recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority,...

-Schlechty's common-sense approach to restructuring is combined with a strategic planner's vision and the translation of beliefs into action... A wide audience, including principals and superintAndents, can find in this book practical outlines for restructuring, and a distinctive and focused view of their role in the educational system sof the twenty-first century.-
--The School Administrator

Schlechty provides an innovative, adaptable framework for helping leaders in all areas of education to identify where change is needed in order to make schools more useful and...