Turning Crisis into Opportunity.

Abstract

The pressure on educators today is tremendous—performance targets grow each year while resources shrink. Faced with budget deficits, district administrators generally keep existing school structures intact while trimming funding for items deemed nonessential, such as preschool, professional development, and central office departments. Unfortunately, cutting these supposedly nonessential items may actually harm the bottom line in the long term. Moreover, cuts like these leave our classrooms looking essentially the same as they did 50 years ago. The question before us is whether we can use this period of crisis as an opportunity to rethink what schools can look like.