Say you're a member of the local school board and you find out that only 7% of your district's 11th graders passed the state math test. What should you do? First answer: Insist on improvement by the school. 

Detroit is a community transformed.  In the lifespan of some of its residents it has downshifted from being one of America’s largest, wealthiest, and most innovative cities to one of its fastest shrinking, poorest, and sclerotic places. A recent study found that a third of the residential parcels in the city—roughly 100,000 lots—are vacant or abandoned buildings. And Mayor Dave Bing, strapped with huge budget deficits, has committed to divide the city into neighborhoods that will get city services and investment because they are still viable and those that won't because they have emptied out.

I had a minor surgery last fall and was once again reminded about how stunningly dysfunctional our health care system is – especially for people like me with high deductibles who basically pay for their own health care. For a $4,000 procedure, I got 14 invoices from 4 different providers spread over a four month time frame. And no one in the system could give me any idea what the (very standard) procedure might cost – even though they offered a 20% discount if I paid within 48 hours. Paid how much, to whom??? I think Franz Kafka is still behind the curtain…

How do you create more good schools in cities?

The Barr Foundation in Boston recently announced that it is committing $50 million to the fight against climate change. The Barr Foundation is the largest environmental grantmaker in New England and has a history of making grants in the areas of open space, water resources, environmental stewardship, environmental justice and smart growth. It was a difficult decision to narrow the foundation's focus, but the urgency of the situation demanded it:

Charter schools, teacher quality, mayoral control of schools, upgraded curricula and so on: change after change, and more on the way. What will the next two decades look like? Will all the changes reach a "tipping point" that radically improves education performance?

Buildings and the appliances within them account for 40 percent of America's energy use and a third of our global warming emissions. A home energy audit is often the first step in making a home more efficient. But getting an audit done properly is not necessarily an easy process.

The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.

After eight years of making education systems use a one-size-fits-all, simplistically linear model for judging a school's performance, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal government is searching for a new form of accountability. The Obama administration recently said it wants to ditch the AYP provision in the No Child Left Behind law, which judges annually whether a school is succeeding or failing based mostly on achieving pre-set targets for student test scores. AYP has been the target of endless complaint and opposition. According to a New York Times report, the administration concluded the AYP system "fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students. Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools."

We've spent much of the last few years working with foundations--and whining about them (with our partners and with many of the people we know who work in foundations). From time to time we have reflected on what it is about the foundations that often makes them frustrating to engage. Our conclusion is that usually it's not a particular individual or an irrational process; it's a particular type of modern organizational culture. And, we've learned from philosopher Ken Wilber, the culture reflects a certain level of consciousness (the "Green/Consensus" level) that impedes strategic decision making. We thought our friends in Foundationland might be interested in this analysis of the "power and pathology" of foundation culture.