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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
NPR
Let's begin with a choice. Say there's a check in the mail. It's meant to help you run your household. You can use it to keep the lights on, the water running and food on the table. Would you rather that check be for $9,794 or $28,639? It's not a trick question. It's the story of America's schools in two numbers. That $9,794 is how much money the Chicago Ridge School District in Illinois spent per child in 2013 (the number has been adjusted by Education Week to account for regional cost differences). It's well below that year's national average of $11,841. Ridge's two elementary campuses and one middle school sit along Chicago's southern edge. Roughly two-thirds of its students come from low-income families, and a third are learning English as a second language.
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Edutopia
To learn, children and adolescents need to feel safe and supported. Educators in successful high-poverty schools have long recognized the critical importance of providing a healthy, safe, and supportive classroom and school environment. This means all forms of safety and security while at school — food if hungry, clean clothes if needed, medical attention when necessary, counseling and other family services as required, and most of all, caring adults who create an atmosphere of sincere support for the students' well-being and academic success. When students who live in poverty experience comprehensive support that works to mitigate the limiting, sometimes destructive poverty-related forces in their lives, the likelihood for success is greatly enhanced.
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The Atlantic
The small Romanian town of Busteni is known for its skiing and stunning sights. But for some, the sight of 147 teenaged girls doing math in the main hall of the town's Sports Hall earlier this April may be even more stunning. Aren't girls supposed to hate math? Or at least, as Barbie once told us, find it "tough"? Not these girls. Thirty nine teams from 39 countries, including the United States, Ecuador, Russia, and the United Kingdom, participated in this year's European Girls Math Olympiad, up from 30 teams in 2015.
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Meet the Complete Testing System. Advantage is everything you need for scanning, analysis & reporting in one convenient bundle. Experience the benefits of our most popular scanner, answer sheets, and easy-to-use reporting software, packaged together. Learn more!
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Education Week
After years of steady decline, the nationwide count of school-age students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has shown an upswing since the 2011-12 school year based on the most recently available federal data, driven by rapid growth in such disability categories as autism. The count of students ages 6-21 with disabilities fell to a low of 5.67 million in fall 2011, but had risen to 5.83 million by fall 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
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Edutopia
Outdoor School is a three-day environmental education program for sixth-grade students. It's the capstone to a year spent studying about our local ecosystems, northern climate systems, and cultural universals with an in-depth study of native peoples of the Arctic. ODS represents many firsts for our students: their first time away from home, their first time camping, and for this generation, it has also become their first experience without a digital connection, and therefore, their first experience being completely responsible for their own entertainment. Out of all the benefits of Outdoor School, here are five that consistently rise to the top, as well as five tips on getting started to create your own Outdoor School program.
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MindShift
Learning from failure has become a popular idea in education recently, partly because it feels like common sense to many people. In a general way, the idea of "picking yourself up after a fall" has long existed in American culture as in many other parts of the world. Teachers are hoping that if they can instill this idea in their students, the small, everyday setbacks inherent to learning new things won't feel so emotionally charged to students, who might instead see them as part of the path to greater understanding and ultimate success.
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Education DIVE
The Obama administration announced new priorities surrounding the Enhancement Assessment Grant program, designed to help states and districts get smarter about standardized testing. The new efforts build upon an October 2015 announcement of President Barack Obama's new Testing Action Plan, which called for a reexamination of the way tests are used in schools. The president said students "should only take tests that are worth taking — tests that are high quality, aimed at good instruction, and make sure everyone is on track," testing shouldn't take up too much classroom time, and the assessments should be one tool in a more complete toolbox to help schools get an indication of student progress and school and teacher effectiveness.
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NPR
As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way. For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.
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NPR
Three million school children in the U.S. are identified as gifted. That's roughly the top 10 percent of the nation's highest achieving students. But Rene Islas, head of the National Association for Gifted Children, says tens of thousands of gifted English language learners are never identified. We sat down with Islas and asked him why. He started out by explaining that there are several different measures for identifying gifted children. The most common in schools is recognizing achievement, above grade level work. But that poses a problem for English language learners, or ELLs, he says.
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Playworks.org
Creating a culture of safe, healthy play transforms children's social, emotional, and physical health. And that has a big impact on the classroom. Kids who get healthy play at recess come back to class ready to learn. In one study, teachers reclaimed 21 hours of class time each through a healthy play culture at recess. Healthy play means fewer conflicts spilling over into the classroom and smoother transitions back to class. But the impact for schools goes beyond productive class time.
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The Christian Science Monitor
America's public schools are a snapshot of a changing America: Since 2014, for the first time in the country's history, a majority of those in public schools have been students of color. That's more than just a statistic. The rise of this "new majority" promises to have sweeping effects on American schools over time. The voices and interests of these students and their parents will need to be better woven into the decisionmaking that affects United States classrooms, many education experts say. What's their emerging message? In part it's in keeping with the age-old desires of families everywhere: a good education in safe schools.
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The Huffington Post
The winner of a $1 million prize honoring excellence in teaching set off shockwaves last year when she said that, given the current climate, she would not encourage people to consider teaching in public schools. Perhaps that declaration, from veteran teacher Nancie Atwell, shouldn't have come as a shock. Atwell decried the unrelenting focus on standardized tests, which she said reduces teachers to "mere technicians." But she could have cited any number of factors that demoralize many teachers currently in the profession and increasingly dissuade people from considering teaching.
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eSchool News
District technology leaders looking for guidance around how to leverage the expanded fiber connectivity opportunities in the E-rate program might find help in the form of a new toolkit from CoSN and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Sixty-eight percent of district technology officers in a recent CoSN survey said their school systems don't have the bandwidth to meet connectivity needs, but the toolkit is an attempt to give those technology leaders guidance as they try and meet ever-increasing bandwidth demands.
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The Conversation (Commentary)
The charter school debate is getting even more heated. Recently, charter opponents launched a campaign from the steps of the Massachusetts State House to warn that charter schools were "sapping resources from the traditional schools that serve most minority students, and creating a two-track system." Similar opposition has been voiced by critics across the country as well. So when it comes to educating kids, are charter schools good or bad?
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Choose from 87 digital, conceptual K-8 science units, with STEM, in grade-level bands, to meet evolving standards. Email for free sample and details: rseela@seelascience.com MORE
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THE Journal
Shipments of Chrome OS-based devices to American K–12 schools increased more than 31 percent in the last year, according to a report released by FutureSource Consulting. Despite an overall decline is computing devices across all other sector, spending on ed tech in the United States increased in the last year, and leading that increase were devices running Chrome OS, such as the Chromebook and Chromebox.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
After eight days of negotiations and countless proposals, a panel of educators, advocates, and officials from the U.S. Department of Education came to agreement on assessment regulations under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Those rules are now on their way to becoming official, after they've been published in the Federal Register. But the panel was unable to reach accord on a sticky spending issue called "supplement-not-supplant" which essentially deals with how federal funds are supposed to be used relative to local and state spending. That means the Education Department will write its own rules on this issue.
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By: Bambi Majumdar
 Dominion Resources, an energy company based in Virginia, recently announced a plan for $1 million in educational grants. The grants will focus on outstanding environment, energy and workforce development programs in K-12 schools. The announcement comes at an important time. In the last decade, an increasing number of K-12 programs have been geared toward incorporating energy and environment education into the curriculum.
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NAESP
Students and staff at Rocky Ridge Elementary School, in Hoover, Alabama, are busy selecting STEM- oriented materials, including tools for teaching kids how to code, as they embark on a new learning journey afforded by a $20,000 UNthink My School grant.
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NAESP
Participants will engage in activities that will allow them to review and reflect on the newly released leader standards and to develop and ensure alignment with their current responsibilities and duties in their schools. Panelists will take a deep dive into the link between educational leadership and student learning, and discuss specific ways the 2015 standards can be used in participants' daily professional practice. This webinar takes place Thursday, April 28, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. ET.
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ZipKrooz™ brings zip line-like adventure to the playground in an exciting, inclusive and safe way!
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| Students will enjoy reading all 5 books in the Cornbread Series (appropriate for 3rd - 5th).
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7701 Las Colinas Ridge, Ste. 800, Irving, TX 75063
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