Excellence, Equity, and Efficiency

Public education in America has undergone a vast series of changes during the last four decades. The majority of these changes are driven by policy—the most recent, No Child Left Behind—but regardless of laws passed, principals and school leaders across the country are scrambling to discover ways to unleash the next breakthrough in public education—success for all. In many parts of the country, that success must come on dwindling resources. Over the years much has been written about excellence, equity, and efficiency. The ongoing struggle for administrators and educational leaders is to discover how these apparent conflicting values can not only be survived but also managed to produce unprecedented results in school improvement. Excellence, Equity, and Efficiency presents a "Quality School Improvement" (QSI) framework for overcoming the conflict that exists between these values and provides recommendations for principals and policymakers to meet the demands for accountability and continuous improvement based upon that framework. Researched and written by a fulltime practicing principal in the field, this book: documents hundreds of actual events and struggles that principals have faced while attempting to manage the demands these values present, includes a story of the author's school and district that is successfully rejecting both the notion of social promotion and retention in their attempt to reconcile excellence, equity, and efficiency through the concept of priority leadership.

Robert Hess is currently the principal at Pioneer School, a K-8 school of 500 students in Lebanon, Oregon and an adjunct professor at Oregon State University. He has spoken on a variety of school improvement topics throughout the state of Oregon, and is the founder of BreakthroughSchools.org a grassroots effort of networking among schools that are seeking extraordinary results for their students. For the past 17 years, he has served children as a teacher and administrator at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.