The Car Wash of the Future
How to raise money for your school, improve your school culture, and help other schools get better along the way.
Let’s start feeding each other by opening our school doors instead of paying third parties for professional development.
It goes something like this: one of my favorite jobs ever was being principal of New Technology High School in Napa, the flagship school of the New Tech Network which has over 200 schools and has served 4800 teachers and 82,500 students. We’d get calls from educators wanting to visit the school, to see this thing called Project-based Learning (PBL) in action.
But some of the educators at my school confided that it could feel kinda like being in a zoo — observed by outsiders looking in, each with separate agendas. It felt intrusive or impersonal, and they asked to be taken out of the hosting visitors loop.
On the other side of the coin, as I led visitors around the school, explaining things about PBL, I’d hear them murmur to each other, “Oh that is great, but we could never do this at my school…” and add a reason, something like, “because our building is way too old”, or “our students are just too poor.”
I was spending hours hosting visitors, which made the staff feel intruded upon, took…
