May the Best Days Always be Ahead

This is the welcome address I delivered at Chicago Tech Academy's second commencement, on June

21st 2014.

One of your schoolmates asked me, earlier this year, if I had ever dreamed that we would havecreated a school that would have inspired so many students to become passionate about technology.

I told her that I could never have imagined a school like this. When we started ChiTech, we thought of education as something that us adults did to you kids. What can we teach you? What opportunities can we provide for you?

What you’ve taught us is that education is a partnership. ChiTech is the school that we are building together. I could never have imagined a school like this, because I never could have imagined students as talented, smart and driven as you.

A Quiet Revolution in Public Schools

We know what drives sustained, high performance in the private sector, especially in knowledge enterprises. Author Daniel Pink sums it up pretty succinctly: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

It's curious, then, why such little attention has been directed toward applying what we know works to the ultimate purpose-driven, knowledge enterprise: the public school.

While many reformers still ask, "how do we better hold teachers and schools accountable for their performance?" very few ask the one question that really matters: "how do we make our school, or school district, a great place for great teachers to work, collaborate and grow? How do we create an organization-wide culture that will drive sustained, long-term performance by tapping into the skills, knowledge and passions of its people?"