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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
NPR
Every state now has laws against school bullying. In the past decade, many districts have overhauled discipline policies and created interventions to increase mutual respect at school. Pop culture and the news media have focused on the harm that is done when children target each other with cruel treatment. Marginalized groups have found solidarity in social media campaigns such as It Gets Better and World Autism Awareness Day, underlining the message that everyone is worthy of learning in a safe environment. And, according to a big new study in the journal Pediatrics, bullying is down. In 2005, 28.5 percent of students surveyed reported experiencing at least one form of bullying. By 2014, that had dropped more than half, to 13.4 percent.
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eSchool News
Even with the best technology in the world, there is one key element that determines student success: a high-quality, highly-effective teacher. In fact, some research estimates that teachers can impact students' lifetime earnings by 10 to 20 percent, which can increase the U.S. gross domestic product by tens of trillions of dollars. And professional development is critical in helping teachers as they continue to hone their skills and evolve as educators. But what kind of PD is most effective, and does the kind of PD that helps teachers best change as teachers become more experienced?
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Queensland University of Technology via Science Daily
Researchers have investigated how vision can affect a child's ongoing learning, with results showing 30 percent of year 3 students tested had uncorrected eye problems that could affect their academic performances.
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District Administration Magazine
Allowing students to explore news articles that spark their curiosity can provide a bigger literacy boost than having them read nonfiction texts about random topics far removed from a youngster's interests. At Lancaster Middle School near Buffalo, New York, students read news articles to help write stories for a classroom magazine and to prepare for debates in social studies.
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Edutopia
Growth in learning does not typically occur through technology used in isolation. It's when instructional strategies and human interaction are used simultaneously with digital tools that learning experiences are best seeded for growth. Consider a student using drill and practice software to learn math skills. Students can easily be distracted from the learning process by the excitement of getting to the reward at the end. And if the student is quickly clicking through the problems to get to that reward, they may not gain much understanding of the intended mathematical goal.
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Over 75% of transgender students feel unsafe at school, and staff do not know how to help them. Welcoming Schools, the nation’s premier professional development program for elementary schools, provides educators with best practices to support transgender students and prevent bias-based bullying.
Visit www.welcomingschools.org to learn more.
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Education Week
Experience programming robots can make young girls more interested in technology and more confident in their abilities in related subjects, a study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found. But programming experience didn't diminish girls' gendered stereotypes about STEM ability. The 1st graders in the study, girls and boys alike, thought that boys were better at programming and robots. This is the first study to find that children as young as age 6 have stereotypes about programming and robotics ability, wrote the researchers.
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American Institutes for Research
California's Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010 revised the cutoff date by which children must turn five for kindergarten entry in that year and established transitional kindergarten, defined as the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for all students affected by the birthdate eligibility change. Since it has been implemented across the state, TK has been shown to significantly improve kindergarten readiness for California's students. But what benefits do students who might need a little extra support — such as English learner students — experience? Understanding the impact of TK on the 33 percent of California kindergartners who do not speak, read, write or understand English well as a result of English not being their home language is critical to evaluating the success of the program.
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Education Dive
Along with math, English and language arts have taken centerstage in the K-12 conversation in recent years — and for good reason. Reading and writing are critical skills which determine a student's educational attainment and future success as an adult. And literacy education is important for developing students' critical thinking skills, while also promoting independence and self-efficacy. This month, we are placing a particular focus on literacy as part of our spotlight series examining trends in the education space. We've gathered a wide range of perspectives from leaders and teachers around the country to showcase the approaches that are working around literacy education.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Youki Terada, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "Recently we posted a brief research finding from Stanford math professor Jo Boaler: 'Timed math tests can discourage students, leading to math anxiety and a long-term fear of the subject.' That terse conclusion, from a 2014 article in Teaching Children Mathematics, provoked a torrent of passionate comments as educators and former students weighed in on the merits of timed testing."
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EdTech Magazine
"People think physical space is an innocent bystander," says Larry Kearns, a principal of Wheeler Kearns Architects in Chicago. "But physical space will reinforce a teacher's mission, or frustrate it." Kearns designs spaces that accommodate larger groups of students and teams of teachers that allow for a high degree of personalization — quite different from the "egg crate model" most people associate with K–12.
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Chalkbeat
When teens complain that school starts too early, they're not wrong, according to new research. This comes as school districts across the country — including in Colorado, California, Indiana and Tennessee — consider starting school later. The study, published last month in the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Resources, looks at districts in Florida and uses a novel approach: the fact that some areas in the state operate in the central time zone while others use eastern time.
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Frontiers via Science Daily
New research approaches the subject of rejection in a different way. It asked the children doing the rejecting, the "rejecters," for the reasons they disliked certain children. The study revealed the act of rejection is complex — the behavior of the rejected child is only partly, or not at all, to blame.
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eSchool News
Although technology changes at a rapid pace, one thing is constant: today's students have a deep desire to learn using digital tools and resources that engage them and help them develop real-world skills. From mobile devices to gaming and online learning, students are ready to take charge of their learning, often outpacing their schools in their use of these digital tools for learning. More than one-third of middle school students say they have already taken an online class in math, science and English. But they want more options, and said they would take more courses, and take a variety of subjects, if possible.
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NPR
Wendy Robinson wants to make one thing very clear. As the long-serving superintendent of Fort Wayne public schools, Indiana's largest district, she is not afraid of competition from private schools. "We've been talking choice in this community and in this school system for almost 40 years," Robinson says. Her downtown office sits in the shadow of the city's grand, Civil War-era Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. In Fort Wayne, a parking lot is the only thing that separates the beating heart of Catholic life from the brains of the city's public schools.
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Scrap the sticky notes and shred the spreadsheets. Create fair, first-class classes with Class Composer. Where does it hurt? When it comes to assigning elementary school students to their classes, it’s the knees, the back and the head. Why?
Read more: http://www.classcomposer.com/news
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District Administration Magazine
When Hopatcong Borough Schools started a 1-to-1 project that distributed 1,450 Chromebooks to its students and staff in 2016, leaders in the northern New Jersey district wondered whether they had enough bandwidth to satisfy the expected demand. They worried the district's 300Mbps connection would slow down or crash, making the new computers about as pedagogically useful as paperweights. The story has a happy ending: The district inexpensively upped its online access allotment to 1Gbps by taking advantage of reduced prices offered by a local provider. "Now everyone has as much bandwidth as they need," says Kyle Bisignani, the district's lead technologist.
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The Associated Press via PBS Newshour
Even as fierce political battles rage in Washington over school choice, most Americans know little about charter schools or private school voucher programs. Still, more Americans feel positively than negatively about expanding those programs, according to a new poll released Friday. "I wonder what the fuss is about," said Beverly Brown, 61, a retired grocery store worker in central Alabama. Brown, who doesn't have children, says American schools need reform, but she is not familiar with specific school options and policies. "Educational standards have to be improved overall."
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NPR
Fidget spinners — the trendy toy of the moment — are causing a commotion. A lot of kids love them, just as many teachers hate them and some people think they're more than just toys. The basic fidget spinner has three prongs centered around a circle with bearings in the middle. Take one prong, give it a spin and watch as the triangle shape becomes a blur, sort of like a ceiling fan. The toys are manufactured by several different companies, and sold all over the place — airports, gas stations, train stations and toy stores.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
Some Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma want to round up the state's English language learner students in K-12 schools to be screened for deportation — a move that would violate federal law. According to Tulsa's News 9, state Rep. Mike Ritze of Tulsa says the newly formed Republican Platform Caucus would like to identify the 80,000-plus ELL students and "then turn them over to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to see if they are citizens." The caucus believes that rounding up the students could save the state up to $60 million. It's unclear how they reached that dollar amount.
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Disability Scoop
Congress' investigative arm is calling on federal officials to consider earlier transition planning and to take other steps to meet the needs of youth with autism entering adulthood. In a wide-ranging report released this month, the Government Accountability Office said that federal agencies can do more to improve outcomes for those on the spectrum who the agency said often fare poorer than individuals with other types of disabilities in the transition to work and postsecondary education.
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Education Week
Seventeen state plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act have passed the U.S. Department of Education's initial completeness check and are ready for peer review, the next step in the approval process, the department announced. "Today's announcement is a big win for ESSA implementation. I am committed to returning decisionmaking power back to states and setting the department up to serve the support and monitoring roles intended by Congress," U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in a statement.
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The Clarion-Ledger
Mississippi's statehouse may have been void of the fireworks once expected amid a looming school funding rewrite that fizzled out in the waning weeks of the 2017 legislative session. But the fight over school money is set to take another turn — this time before the state Supreme Court. On May 17, Justices will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove in 2015 on behalf of 21 school districts in the state, including the state's second-largest, Jackson Public Schools.
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NAESP
If there's one resource that principals across the nation agree is in high demand, regardless of the type of school they lead, it is time. Now that the Every Student Succeeds Act has passed and is at the implementation stage, principals must balance their everyday responsibilities to make sure that they invest in the future by helping to shape the new law's application at the state and local levels. ESSA was designed to include principals and other stakeholders in the development of state plans. So, principals should be prepared to champion the policies that they know enable schools to deliver to students a well-rounded, complete education.
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NAESP
Are you interested in strengthening your career while preparing a new generation of leaders? The National Mentor Training and Certification Program offers a highly structured professional development program which integrates a mentor training component that can make the critical difference in sustainability of skilled leaders. NAESP will be hosting upcoming mentor trainings in Mason, Michigan, June 21-22; and Alexandria, Virginia, July 27-28. Click here to register and find more information.
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