Transforming America’s Education


Transforming American Education: The School Bell’s Ringing; Is Anyone Listening?Transforming America’s Education: The School Bell’s Ringing; Is Anyone Listening?  16 articles by the renowned writer on educational issues, Peter Kline. Peter takes up a variety of concerns from his vast experienced personal repertoire, including his first-hand challenges as a secondary school teacher, descriptions of evolving neuro-scientific breakthroughs that could dramatically affect learning, current critiques of how we teach and how students learn, and an indictment of the roadblocks caused by educational bureaucracies.

ABOUT PETER KLINE

Peter KlinePeter Kline is a broker and developer of state of the art learning systems. He has authored over 15 books and many articles on education, literature and the arts. He is a founder of The Thornton Friends School, one of the leading private schools in the Metropolitan Washington D. C. area. This school is the main subject of a chapter entitled “Creating Great Schools” in Reclaiming Our Children by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

For the past twenty years, he has been involved with various innovative learning programs, especially integrative-accelerative learning, a process that restores a blend of creativity and critical thinking to the educational process and focuses on organizational learning program systems enhancement. He is currently expanding this interest with the development of new approaches to cognitive skills education and the creation of instructional programs.

His latest books include Why America’s Children Can’t Think, Ten Steps to a Learning Organization, The Everyday Genius, School Success: The Inside Story, The Butterfly Dreams and The Genesis Principle. In preparation is an eighteen year research project culminating in three volumes entitled The Shakespeare Mysteries.

Kline includes among his activities the role (as a consultant) of Director of Instruction and Learning with the Learning Enhancement Corporation in Chicago, which is dedicated to developing and distributing state of the art learning improvement programs. This includes school transformation projects. In the process he is not only involved in the development of the LEC BrainWare product, but also new state of the art developmental reading and math programs. He is also working with a number of groups that are collectively creating an international approach to developing and distributing innovative learning methods.

His work in education has been referenced and discussed in several landmark books, including The Learning Revolution, Accelerated Learning (including revised, updated edition), Effective Secondary Teaching: Beyond the Bell Curve, and Grits, Guts and Genius. The latter devoted an entire chapter to his work at Chicago’s Guggenheim Elementary School and at Eastman Kodak. His chapter on mathematics instruction appears in Robert Sorensen’s Preventing Early Learning Failure, published by the American Society of Curriculum Development. Kline’s book, The Story of Numbers, has also been made into a short film.

In 1990 and 1991, Kline worked with Eastman Kodak and the New York State Public Schools to develop major programs for teacher training and corporate culture change. This process saved Eastman Kodak 40% on its training costs and produced results that were 27 times as effective as those previously achieved in the same area of training. The program was the subject of a major article in Management Review.

In addition to his work with schools and corporations, Kline has been involved in welfare to workforce programs in Elkhart, Michigan City, Fort Wayne, Valparaiso and Gary, Indiana, Camden, New Jersey, Oakland, California, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – with a particular focus on job training and enhancement of quality of employee performance. Among many corporations, schools and non-profits he has worked with Kodak, Norwest Banks, Bellcore, Bellcore TEC, Ameritech, Learning Strategies, IDS, Detroit Center for Professional Growth and Development, North American Sign Company, Hamline University, Prince George’s Community College, SpeakEasy Language School, Boy Scouts of America, California Youth Authority, New York State Department of Adult Education, Wegman’s, Intel, Sandia Labs, Intel, Honeywell, Northeastern Indiana TQM Network, U. S. West, TPS Corporation, Laubach Literacy, Literacy Volunteers of America, South San Francisco’s Literacy Program, Fort Lauderdale Literacy Program and the Canadian Department of External Affairs Foreign Service Institute. He has also worked with many school systems, including in Chicago, IL; Minneapolis and St. Paul,MN; Brooklyn, Queens, North Syracuse, Rochester, and Utica, NY; Washington, D. C.; Fort Wayne, Goshen, Elkhart, Concord, and South Bend, IN; Kalamazoo and Detroit, MI, and Arlington, VA.

Kline’s achievements in the field of educational reform have been the subject of two PBS TV documentaries: The Everyday Genius and Learning in the Workplace: The Key to Quality and Productivity. He is currently working on a Flagship Schools project to develop schools that volunteer to become modelschools for what is currently the best way of educating children that can be assembled from learning resources available worldwide. Kline also works with corporations to develop tools for increasing their efficiency and effectiveness, primarily from transforming them into learning organizations in which all employees are involved in an open book approach to quality improvement.

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