Search results for ""Author William L. Fibkins""

With budget cuts looming every year, administrators and union leaders find themselves in a never-ending game of promoting how good their school is and why budget cuts will derail their ongoing success. The vehicle they choose for this ongoing self-promotion is what William Fibkins calls the “dazzle” approach, which focuses only on “good news.” Overtime administrators and staff often come to believe the positive reviews of the good news process and overlook or abandon those students who don’t make good news but instead act out, fail, cause trouble and give the school a bad name. These are the “bad news” kids, and their lives are not newsworthy. This book is about the unintended consequences that can occur when the "good news” process becomes heavily embedded in school life—a process that creates two different worlds in a school community that often prides itself on fostering unity and belonging. The school media promotions may say “All is well here,” but this positive spin belies the divisions that breed isolation and estrangement for both the “good news” and “bad news” kids, which gives rise to class warfare in the school community. In a culture in which some students are valued as more worthy than others, being a more worthy student can have a serious downside that is as risky as being an unworthy student. This book explores these often hidden consequences and what school and community leaders need to do to right this sinking ship—a ship that seems sturdy and well-built to onlookers but is abusing its crew to keep afloat. Some schools operate on a system which uses high achieving students as a commodity to pass school budgets and downplays the cries of troubled students to be included in “their” school. Good news gets headlines while bad news is shifted to the back page or left out, resulting in an “all is well, problem-free” picture of the school.

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As suggested by Edward Stancik, a special investigator for the New York City school system, there is no epidemic of sexual misconduct in schools. Still the practice in many schools of looking the other way, ignoring such behaviors, and maintaining a public posture that 'it can't happen here' is off target. Sexual misconduct does occur in many secondary schools, and in most cases the response is limited to warning teachers and coaches about the legal aspects and liabilities involved. Here, William Fibkins argues that these approaches only make teachers and coaches unwilling to offer help to needy students. In the end, educators are still at risk because they are left without effective training on how to set boundaries and carry on helpful supervision and monitoring. To help eliminate sexual misconduct in schools, this book provides step-by-step training procedures that can be used as part of the schools' staff development program to teach educators about the importance of setting boundaries. Real-life case studies documenting inappropriate teacher-student relationships are included. To learn more, visit www.williamfibkins.com.

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The Graveyard of School Reform: Why the Resistance to Change and New Ideas explores the critical role resistance plays in defeating valued programs for students, parents, and staff. It is time for education reformers to face the hard truths about the skilled and destructive forces of resisters and to learn that good ideas and calls for change are not enough. Reformers need to learn how to overcome these entrenched forces and muster new skills with the will to win, courage, and the persistence required. Resistance has been given little attention for far too long considering the huge cost and the loss of programs we desperately need. Fibkins argues that reformers often accept defeat when they should be discovering new ways to win. As an education reformer Fibkins has observed far too many necessary programs meet an untimely death due to the naivety of reformers. By reviewing lessons learned from other failed reforms and analyzing successful reforms, Fibkins new book addresses issues and presents doable models for reformers to succeed and deliver what administrators, staff, parents, students, and community members need to make their schools the best they can be.

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