By Bob Lenz

One of my favorite things to say when doing strategic planning with teachers is that the plan has a 50 percent chance of success and a 100 percent chance of teaching us how to get “smarter” about delivering on our mission.

I love saying this because it conveys an essential truth: Failure is not a bad thing. It is a guaranteed and inevitable part of learning. In any and all endeavors, and especially as a learning organization, we will experience failure, as surely as a toddler will fall while learning to walk.

Unfortunately, in education, particularly in this high-stakes accountability era, failure has become the term attached to our persistent challenges. Wholesale problems, such as the achievement gap and the high school dropout rate, are labeled as “education failures.” We argue over how to “prevent” more failure. Increasingly, failure has come to mean something terrible, something to be avoided, and shunned.

via Failure Is Essential to Learning | Edutopia.

By Evie Blad

If all of your friends jumped off that bridge, would you do it too? Well, it depends on how old you are, according to a new study in Psychological Science.

If you are in elementary school, the answer is probably “No way!” And if you are about to graduate from high school, the answer may well be, “What does Dad say?” But at the start of adolescence, students may just shrug; of all age groups, they are most likely to jump on the assumption that other teenagers must know what they are doing.

via In Assessing Risk, Younger Teens Turn to Peers, Not Adults, Study Finds – Rules for Engagement – Education Week.

By Dan Walters

One of the Capitol’s perpetual debates is over how much California spends to educate its 6.2 million elementary and high school students, especially in relationship to other states.

Education groups, led by the influential California Teachers Association, have complained for years that the state is near the bottom in per-pupil spending, but with recent and sharp increases in spending, California has climbed rapidly in state-to-state comparisons.

A new report by the National Education Association, the national teachers union, shows that California is now 29th in per-pupil spending, just a few dollars under the national average.

When all forms of school spending – such as capital outlay and repaying school construction bonds – are included in the calculations, California’s per-pupil spending hits the national average.

via State moves up national school spending chart Daily Republic.