The Eden Conspiracy is a unique book with at least four different audiences: policy makers and politicians seeking to dramatically improve the cost-effectiveness of education; educators who want to develop school programs that accelerate students' progression from school to lifetime success; community stakeholders, including parents, business people, and civic leaders, who want their schools to better address the needs of their communities; and educational reformers who are ready for a sustainable approach that anchors educational programs in the ongoing needs of the communities they serve.
Author, Joe Harless, thought leader and master practitioner in the field of organizational performance improvement and learning, brings thirty years of pioneering experience to the challenge of improving our schools. His Accomplishment-Based Curriculum Development approach represents a paradigm shift from organizing curriculum by categories of subject matter to designing curriculum to enable students to achieve specific accomplishments needed for successful personal life and top-paying employment. He advocates a "conspiracy" among all the stakeholders in a community and the school system to define what their educational programs need to produce.
This new edition includes a summary of what has occurred since the first printing in 1998: a showcase program in Coweta County, Georgia, replicated in 36 other locations, exported to other nations, and enabling students to achieve nearly twice the average salary range for American workers upon graduation while drawing tens of millions of dollars of investment to communities where schools prepare their students for 21st century jobs and 21st century citizenship.
For more than 30 years Joe Harless headed the Harless Per-formance Guild, a network of organizations and consul-tants who use his concepts and procedures to help business, industry, and the military improve the performance of their employees. He is generally recognized as one of the founders of the relatively new field of Human Performance Technology. He is the author of the acclaimed Accomplishment-Based Curriculum Development System (ABCD), that has been installed in the educational departments of numerous organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The ABCD System is widely regarded as state-of-the-art in instructional development. His most recent writing, the Peak Performance System, is a massive work that provides detailed guidelines for analysis, design, and development of a wide range of interventions to improve people-performance. Harless received the Gilbert Distinguished Profes-sional Achievement award from the International Soci-ety for Performance Improvement in 1996, and was elected to the Human Resources Development Hall of Fame in 1988. Recently retired from active management of his com-pany, Harless now devotes his time to reflection and research. The Eden Conspiracy is the first of a series of commentaries on societal problems and needs.
Carl Binder, CPT, PhD, is President of the Performance Thinking Network (www.SixBoxes.com) and has been helping client organizations worldwide improve performance with research-based methods for over 35 years. After studying with B.F. Skinner as a doctoral student in Experimental Psychology at Harvard, he spent several decades conducting instructional research, developing curriculum, and training teachers. These pursuits overlapped with his work in organizational performance improvement that began during the 1980's. He has had many mentors in his career, and Joe Harless was one of the most important, along with Beatrice Barrett, Eric Haughton, Ogden Lindsley, Tom Gilbert, and Robert Horn. Carl has published roughly 60 professional articles and chapters, and has been honored with lifetime achievement awards from the American Psychological Association (APA), the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), and the Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) Network. Contact Carl at carlbinder@sixboxes.com.
