Finding Common Ground in Education

A REALISTIC GUIDE TO FINDING COMMON GROUND IN EDUCATION BETWEEN ADMINISTRATORS AND TEACHERS In today’s world, it is becoming difficult to make any significant change at the national and state levels. We are constantly facing experts whose job it is to hijack agendas and movements of change. Therefore, the only way to make real and actual change is in our school communities. This progressive format shares a down-to-earth approach that both authors feel is being sidestepped in communities all over the country. It is our hope that this podcast will help facilitate tough conversations and bring the focus back to what is most important for both sides to understand in order for public education-The students. This content is a collection of conversations, research, debates, and discussions between two childhood friends who grew up together in Youngstown, Ohio. As graduates of the class of 1989 from Austintown Fitch High School, they parted ways with the goal to meet again soon to teach and coach together in the same school district. Even though life prevented them from working in the same brick and mortar building for the last 25 years, technology made them successful long-distance colleagues. As their career paths pushed them in different directions, they found themselves on opposite sides of the current educational model. One a school district superintendent in California and the other a Union president in Ohio. Not only would their positions put them on opposite sides of the education debates, so would the politics of the states they resided in over the last two decades as California primarily falling on the left side of the political spectrum and Ohio standing firmly on the right side of the aisle.