Where do I find the “Kid Ready” schools?

When you have kids it’s like someone transplants a new chip into your brain (and heart). All of a sudden you are a protector and dreamer, and an untrained life coach.

As someone who has invested all of my professional energy into education I thought school and my own kids would be easy.

The universe laughed at me.

What the universe gave me was creative, curious, loving, and big thinking kids. Kids that live and breathe their membership in Generation Alpha.

Then the universe gave me schools that are safe, clean, loving, and sadly stuck in the world of a GenXer. Great schools and great scores, but not capturing the curiosity of my Generation Alpha kids.

The universe is getting a good chuckle out of my life as a parent.

Parenting is hard stuff and it’s no lie when I say that even if you have a deep well of knowledge and understanding of education, when it’s your own kid you feel pretty darn helpless.

So when it comes to choosing a school for your kid what should we expect?

Faced with a pretty tough decision about school choice I took off my “sometimes emotional mom-hat” and looked at it from the researcher/educator/advocate lens.

So I made myself a list of the things that research on learning, education, systems change, and “kids today” tells us about what we should expect from our schools.