A good school will improve the community it is embedded within and serves.

A good school can adapt quickly to human needs and technology change.

A good school produces students that not only read and write, but choose to.

A good school sees itself.

A good school has diverse and compelling measures of success–measures that families and communities understand and value.

A good school is full of students that don’t just understand “much,” but rather know what’s worth understanding.

A good school knows it can’t do it all, so seeks to do what’s necessary exceptionally well.

A good school improves other schools and cultural organizations with which it’s connected.

A good school is always on and never closed. (It is not a factory.)

A good school makes certain that every single student and family feels welcome and understood on equal terms.

A good school is full of students that not only ask great questions, but do so with great frequency and ferocity.

A good school changes students; students change great schools.

A good school understands the difference between broken thinking and broken implementation.

A good school speaks the language of its students.

A good school doesn’t make empty promises, create noble-but-misleading
mission statements, or mislead parents and community-members with
edu-jargon. It is authentic and transparent.

A good school values its teachers, administrators, and parents as agents of student success.

A good school favors personalized learning over differentiated learning.

A good school teaches thought, not content.

A good school makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other “pieces” invisible.

A good school is disruptive of bad cultural practices. These include
intolerance based on race, income, faith, and sexual preference,
illiteracy, and apathy toward the environment.

A good school produces students that know themselves in their own context, one that
they know and choose. This includes culture, community, language, and
profession.

A good school produces students that have personal and specific hope for the future that they can articulate and believe in
and share with others.

A good school produces students that can empathize, critique, protect, love, inspire, make, design, restore, and
understand almost anything–and then do so as a matter of habit.

A good school will erode the societal tendency towards greed, consumerism, and hoarding of resources we all need.

A good school is more concerned with cultural practices than pedagogical
practices–students and families than other schools or the educational
status quo.

A good school helps student separate trivial knowledge from vocational knowledge from academic knowledge from applied
knowledge from knowledge-as-wisdom.

A good school will experience disruption in its own patterns and practices and values
because its students are creative, empowered, and connected, and cause
unpredictable change themselves.

A good school will produce students that can think critically about issues of human interest,
curiosity, artistry, craft, legacy, husbandry, agriculture and then do
so.

A good school will help students see themselves in terms of their historical framing, familial legacy, social context, and global
connectivity.