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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
EdCentral (commentary)
Until recently, principals have been largely overlooked with most education policy attention focused on improving teacher quality. Principals play a central role in supporting teaching quality and are strongly linked to student achievement. In elementary schools, principals must be able to foster a school culture that values early education, to understand what high-quality teaching looks like in the early grades, and to provide useful feedback and support to early grade teachers and increasingly pre-K teachers as more elementary schools offer pre-K for three-and four-year-olds.
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eSchool News
An online petition urges Congress to provide $250 million to help schools and districts integrate computer science into the curriculum.
In a letter sent to Congress, the authors note that technology is quickly changing society, and “participating in this world requires access to computer science in our schools.”
They also state that more than 100 school districts are working to roll out computer science courses, and 20 states have passed policies around the subject and are in the process of identifying professional development for computer science teachers. But despite pockets of growth, three-quarters of U.S. schools do not offer meaningful computer science courses.
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The Atlantic
A group of scholars at Harvard University is spearheading a campaign to make sure the early-childhood programs policymakers put in place to disrupt intergenerational poverty are backed by the latest science.
The idea sounds entirely reasonable, but it's all too rare in practice, says Jack P. Shonkoff, the director of the university's Center on the Developing Child and the chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. That's because program grants and policies are generally structured in ways that incentivize "positive" results. Agreements along the lines of, "We'll give you funding to test this specific policy intervention and if you can prove it worked in three years, we'll give you more," are standard. Shonkoff and his colleagues think that model needs a major update.
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THE Journal
The traditional course management system isn't cutting it for schools trying to implement a student-centered learning model, according to a new report from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. After all, stated "Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems To Optimize Learning," the typical learning management system is course- and teacher-focused, while the best student-centric approaches must be able to track "how, when and where students learn; how they plan their learning and demonstrate mastery; how their progress is tracked and reported; how they access resources and the nature of the resources; how they communicate and collaborate with others; as well as how teacher, parents and other educators work with and support students."
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Edutopia
Many teachers intuitively know that connecting with their students at an emotional level is key for young people's academic, social, and emotional growth. These teachers care deeply about students, paying attention to the climate in the classroom, their students' engagement during instruction, or their response to feedback. Research in the field of SEL has proven what effective educators already knew and had been doing all along: social and emotional skills have an important role in learning. Students bring emotions to the classroom from life outside of school. They might be dealing with a stressful situation at home like a parent losing his or her job, or maybe something more momentary like an argument with a friend.
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eSchool News
Assessments are a hot topic in K-12 education — particularly in states that now require school districts to assess students in all subjects, not just those tested by the state. Where will districts get the new assessment content? Should teachers be involved in developing items and assessments? Can technology help? What about test security? Performance Matters, a provider of assessment and data management systems for K-12 schools, recently conducted an informal survey to uncover what educators are doing to meet the new requirements and identify where they need help.
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OPB
A survey from a Portland think tank digs into the controversy around standardized testing.
The Northwest Evaluation Association found students tend to support tests that help them in the classroom. Many parents, teachers and students reported skepticism of end-of-year state exams. NWEA chief executive Matt Chapman said how long it takes to see the test scores matters to many test takers.
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MindShift
It's no mystery that being bullied hurts. Whatever form the abuse takes — whether it's being tripped, teased, excluded, mocked, insulted, gossiped about or ridiculed, in-person or via social media — the target suffers. Beyond the short-term pain, such mistreatment can have lasting mental and physical health effects as well, reports the American Academy of Pediatrics. Parents also struggle. Though desperate to help their ailing child, parents can't lurk in hallways and lunchrooms waiting to protect their off-spring from social harm.
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The Christian Science Monitor
Ask parents trying to orchestrate a family dinner, and the exasperated answer will be immediate: Yes, the kids are addicted to their smartphones. What may be more surprising is that more than half of teenagers think they are hooked, too.
And what's most concerning is that overuse of those too-handy devices appears to be changing the way America's roughly 40 million teens communicate and form relationships in the wider world, experts say. Certainly, concerns about screens and distracted teens have been around since at least the 1990s. But the ever-changing — and ever-present — nature of smartphones and social media is transforming society faster than families, or even the experts, can keep up.
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The New York Times
Before she became a neuroscientist, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang was a seventh-grade science teacher at a school outside Boston. One year, during a period of significant racial and ethnic tension at the school, she struggled to engage her students in a unit on human evolution. After days of apathy and outright resistance to Ms. Immordino-Yang's teaching, a student finally asked the question that altered her teaching — and her career path — forever: "Why are early hominids always shown with dark skin?"
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MindShift
Girls often excel in school, sitting quietly and following teacher directions more carefully than their male peers. There's evidence to suggest that girls are also being socialized to be perfect, which makes them less likely to tackle challenges in areas where they don't already excel. In her TED Talk, Reshma Saujani recognizes that tendency in herself, highlighting her first really courageous career move at age 33. She argues it's time society stops socializing girls to be perfect, because it's doing them harm in the long run.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week (commentary)
Washington is sometimes referred to as the "Beltway bubble," a phenomenon in which think tanks, lobbyists, and legislators talk only to each other before making policy decisions that have the potential to affect millions of children and families nationwide. Unfortunately, this policymaking-in-a-bubble method often fails to reflect practical, real-world knowledge. Policymakers' frequent lack of understanding about how things work on the ground jeopardizes the health and well-being of the very people the government intends to serve. To break into that bubble, Head Start, the federally funded early-learning program designed to prepare our nation's most at-risk children for success in kindergarten and beyond, is taking a different approach to ensure that its practitioners are at the forefront of early-childhood policy recommendations.
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The Associated Press via The San Diego Union-Tribune
More than a decade after a catastrophic hurricane led to the state's takeover of most New Orleans public schools, Louisiana's Legislature is poised to return oversight to a local school board that was once widely maligned.
The state House in Baton Rouge voted 55-16 for legislation that returns governance of more than 50 schools to the New Orleans board as early as 2018. The Senate has approved the measure but will have to cast one more vote next week on minor House language changes. The bill would then go to Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has said he will sign it.
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The Huffington Post
Seventy-five high schools in Illinois rank among the nation's most challenging, according to the Washington Post.
The Washington Post's annual ranking assesses nearly 2,300 high schools across the U.S. based on a formula it calls the "Challenge Index" ratio, which is calculated by taking the total number of advanced placement, international baccalaureate and advanced international certificate of education tests administered at a given school in 2015 and dividing by the number of seniors who graduated that same year.
A ratio of at least 1.00 means a school had as many tests in 2015 as graduates, but only 10 percent of the roughly 22,000 public high schools in the U.S. reached that standard and earned a spot on the list, according to the Washington Post.
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NAESP
Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland is one of six sites supported by the Wallace Foundation to participate in the Principal Pipeline Initiative which investigates the challenge of developing and offering specific supports to assistant principals and aspiring principals. Hear how assistant principals are being developed and how they acquire skills to become effective transformational school leaders as they discuss their experiences with strategies and practices that strengthen their voice and school leadership. This webinar takes place Tuesday, May 17, 3-4:30 p.m. ET.
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NAESP
To be successful in any field, aspiring leaders need role models, critical advice, and guidance. Novice principals are increasingly feeling the pressure of leading the change process, developing a successful school, or transforming a failing school without support that is relevant and attainable. That is why all principals entering the profession should be provided support that includes high quality mentoring. Let’s face it, the principalship can be a lonely job, and having the right connections and support early on can make the difference between someone thriving or leaving the professional altogether.
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