1. I have not written for a couple months. I've been finishing up my next book entitled From Systems Thinking to Systemic Action: 48 Key Questions to Guide the Journey. It is due out in July from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. 
2.  The conference that is most closely aligned with the concepts taught in the LtoJ seminars is the National Quality in Education conference. NQEC moves from state to state.  This year the conference will be in Reno, Nevada from November 16 to 18. The URL for the conference is http://nqec.asq.org/.    I will be one of the three keynotes.
3. Attached is an article by  Mike Carney, mike.carney@jenksps.org, from Jenks, Oklahoma.  He was a science teacher when I began  LtoJ work in Jenks and is now the high school science resource teacher.  It is quite detailed, worth printing out, and a superbly written description of their story.  Of particular interest is the comparison, over several years, between biology results for Jenks compared to the state of Oklahoma.  Jenks has shown great progress while the state is basically the same.
4.  Science teachers in an Arizona high school discovered, to their horror, that the first chapter in their high school biology textbook was an Arizona kindergarten science standard!  The second chapter was a grade two standard.  Next year, the students will receive a list of science they are to know prior to biology. Teaching will begin with high school biology in week one of the year.  What about the students that do not know the elementary and middle school science?  Teachers will list by each K-8 science concept, the chapter in the high school biology book where the information is located. Now the teachers expect to have time to actually teach all of the required high school biology.
5. PGA is a good nmenonic device to assist with data.  The "P" is perception, the "G" is graph and the "A" is analysis.  Earlier in Fulton County, Georgia staff were able to use Excel to study the relationship between a well-known educational program and state test results.  First was perception. "We're not sure this program is helping."  Next was the correlation graph made with Excel using the scatter command.  The spread sheet is made using three columns: (1) student name, (2) number from commercial program and (3) score on state exam.  The resulting correlation chart lets you know if the dots are lined up or scattered all over the page.  Then comes the analysis with Pearson's coefficient.  In the spread sheet view, under function, type "pearson."  The new formula you have will caculate Pearson's correlation coefficient.  One well known education program had a correlation of .39, which gives little confidence that the program will actually assist the school with its responsibilities. If the reading program and the state results were highly correlated, we could not state that the reading program was the cause of the state results.  We could only have confidence that if students did well on the school program they would probably do well on the state test.  In this example, educators can have little confidence that success on the commercial program will have anything to do with state test results. 
6.   The waste/ten root causes powerpoint slide from January was created with Power Point 2007.  Attached is a copy of the slide that can be opened with any version of Power Point.
7.  The American Association of School Administrators published an article entitled, "It's the System, Not the Staff, That Needs a Tune Up.  The URL for the article is http://www.aasa.org/publications/saarticledetailtest.cfm?ItemNumber=10247
8.  John Maxwell wrote in The 21 Most Powerful Minutes in a Leader's Day "Good leaders do more than motivate people to follow in the moment.  They provide structure that allows leadership to flourish." (page 128).  The LtoJ process is a structure that allows students and teachers to flourish.

Lee Jenkins, Lee@LtoJConsulting.com