Facilitator's Guide to Failure Is Not an Option(TM): Six Principles That Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools

This facilitator’s guide gives staff developers all the tools they need for planning and leading training events to help educators create successful and sustainable high-performing schools.

Alan M. Blankstein is Founder and President of the HOPE Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose Honorary Chair is Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The HOPE Foundation (Harnessing Optimism and Potential through Education) is dedicated to supporting educational leaders over time in creating school cultures where failure is not an option for any student. Founded in 1989, HOPE has focused for the last decade on helping districts build leadership capacity to close gaps and sustain student success.

The HOPE Foundation launched the professional learning communities movement in educational circles, first by bringing W. Edwards Deming and later Peter Senge to light in a series of Shaping America’s Future forums and PBS video conferences from 1988–1992. Now, the HOPE Foundation provides some 20 conferences annually, highlighting their long-term successes in sustaining student achievement in districts and regions in seventeen states and parts of Canada and South Africa.

A former “high risk” youth, Alan began his career in education as a music teacher and has worked in youth-serving organizations since 1983, including the March of Dimes, Phi Delta Kappa, and the National Educational Service (now Solution Tree) which he founded in 1987 and directed for 12 years.

In addition to authorship of this award-winning book, Alan is Publisher of three Failure Is Not an Option® video series and Senior Editor along with Paul Houston of the thirteen-volume The Soul of Educational Leadership series. Alan also co-authored the Reaching Today’s Youth curriculum and has published articles in Educational Leadership, The School Administrator, Executive Educator, High School Magazine, Reaching Today’s Youth, and Inside the Workshop. Alan has also provided keynote presentations and workshops for virtually every major educational organization.

Alan is on the Harvard International Principals Centers advisory board, served as Board member for Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, is former Co-Chair of Indiana University’s Neal Marshall Black Culture Center’s Community Network and advisor to the Faculty and Staff for Student Excellence (FASE) mentoring program. He also served as advisory board member for the Forum on Race, Equity, and Human Understanding with the Monroe County Schools in Indiana, and on the Board of Trustees for the Jewish Child Care Agency (JCCA), in which he was once a youth in residence.