Building on a foundation that identifies courageous school leadership and the professional learning community as the center of effective school reform, this powerful new book by Alan M. Blankstein offers six guiding principles for creating and sustaining high-performing schools:

1. Common mission, vision, values, and goals

2. Systems for prevention and intervention

3. Collaborative teaming for teaching and learning

4. Data driven decision making and continuous improvement

5. Active engagement from family and community

6. Building sustainable leadership capacity

Covering theory into practice, applications that include case studies and vignettes, and techniques for addressing difficult issues, the book also provides valuable dual perspectives on the critical issues: how implementation looks when its done right as well as when things go wrong. Failure Is Not an Option is sure to be the state-of-the-art resource that school leaders reach for when, in Michael Fullans words, they need "practical applications to perplexing problems."