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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
Education DIVE
With unnerving frequency, school districts and communities are discovering elevated lead levels after undertaking tests of drinking water sources in their facilities. Recently, comprehensive re-testing in New York City public school buildings found that 83 percent of buildings had at least one water source with lead levels about 15 parts per billion, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standard level for when action must be taken.
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eSchool News (commentary)
Tim Webb, a contributor for eSchool News, writes; "Every child deserves the opportunity to lead, learn, grow and succeed. It's only through a 360-degree approach to learning that we can provide these necessary opportunities to all children. At E.A. Cox Middle School, we are committed to a 'whatever it takes' approach to success for each student entrusted to our care. In order to truly dedicate ourselves to this method, my staff and I decided two years ago to develop a three-tiered approach for our curriculum and instruction."
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District Administration Magazine
If you have ever been to Disney World, you have experienced the pinnacle of customer service. Disney is intentional in its commitment to creating a positive, memorable experience for its guests. Disney has a specific training program for all employees, predicated on creating magic. Disney's core values are clear in the actions of each employee, and the company trains, measures, tests and continually improves it processes.
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By: Erick Herrmann (commentary)
 English learners, like all students, face the pressure of achieving in school, and they hope to learn the content being presented in the class. Additionally, like all of the other students in the class, they want to make friends with their classmates and other students in the school. These social and academic pressures that all students face, though, can be compounded for English learners. In Part 1 of this article, we'll look at four ways teachers can support students socially.
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The Hechinger Report
After-school programs can help students develop an interest in science, technology, engineering or math. If children haven't developed an interest in those fields by the time they leave middle school, then it's unlikely to happen. After-school programs can help expose students to more than they see in the regular school day, providing an opportunity for them to develop these interests.
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EdTech Magazine
Conducting small classroom exams and big standardized tests in an online format is a great way to create efficiencies in both assessment and grading, as long the school has the infrastructure in place to support it. However, a new study has found that when it comes to testing elementary and middle school students digitally, tests need to have easier navigation.
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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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eSchool News
Although STEM education is inarguably essential in today's economy, it is not always seamlessly incorporated into early childhood education–and the barriers to inclusion are more pervasive than many educators might realize. "Just as the industrial revolution made it necessary for all children to learn to read, the technology revolution has made it critical for all children to understand STEM," according to the report.
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EdSurge
Ariana Garcia, a teaching resident at the Great Oaks Charter School in New York City, had trouble managing her eighth-grade class when she first took over. She says her friendly demeanor is better suited for teaching sixth-grade students and had to make a few personality adjustments to tackle eighth-graders. "One of the really big struggles for me was classroom management. The kids say I have a cartoon character voice, and I smile a lot," says Garcia in an interview with EdSurge.
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Education Week
Elizabeth Iwaszewicz, a kindergarten teacher at Lafayette Elementary School in San Francisco, pairs native English speakers with English language learners during a turn-and-talk exercise to improve their speaking and listening skills. She assigns her students two partners: A student exchanges ideas with his or her first partner, and then relays those ideas to the second partner.
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By: Bambi Majumdar (commentary)
 There have been conflicting reports about the ending of Michelle Obama's girls education program. The start of May saw a Trump administration memo announcing the end of the "Let Girls Learn" program. The backlash was swift and fierce. Within a week, the government announced that it is not going to make any changes to the program. The "Let Girls Learn" program is an international initiative to make education possible and accessible for adolescent girls in developing countries.
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MindShift
For teachers, the carefully controlled conditions of education research can seem ridiculous when the reality of the classroom involves regular interruptions, absences and general chaos. Professor John Dunlosky is trying to bridge these two worlds, intentionally studying the effectiveness of strategies that lab studies indicate are promising, but that don't require special technology or extra resources. He is trying to figure out what few strategies could actually make a big difference for learners, and which ones are a waste of time.
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EdTech Magazine (commentary)
Melissa Wrenchey, a contributor for EdTech Magazine, writes "As a teacher in a large district that has curriculum and technology aligned with certain stands, I often encounter tools that I would designate as ones that students should know how to use. For example, Microsoft Word for collaborating with teammates, OneDrive for file sharing and Excel for data analysis. Sometimes these tools seem to be a perfect fit when teaching other standards such as Common Core for third grade, which requires students to 'conduct short research projects that build knowledge about a topic.' You would teach word processing skills as students are conducting their research."
District Administration Magazine
Making the transformation from traditional to online assessments can cause confusion for many districts, even when it comes to basic definitions. In Houston ISD, for example, analysts found that school leaders were using the right terminology, but their understanding of the words differed widely. Some thought an online assessment was about downloading a scoring sheet, while others believed it meant getting on a computer and doing a PARCC-like assessment.
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Reuters
A growing number of U.S. children may develop vision problems before they reach kindergarten, according to a study that suggests eye screenings will become increasingly important for the preschool set. For the study, researchers analyzed data from U.S. census records and from eye exams on about 12,000 kids under 6 years old. Nationwide, researchers estimated that more than 174,000 kids from 3 to 5 years old had vision impairment as of 2015 and projected that their ranks will swell by 26 percent to more than 220,000 by 2060.
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The New York Times
The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, and began composing essays. Looking up from her laptop, Masuma Khan, then 11 years old, said her essay explored how schooling in ancient Athens differed from her own. "Back then, they had wooden tablets and they had to take all of their notes on it," she said. "Nowadays, we can just do it in Google Docs."
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The Brookings Institution
Taking that big yellow bus to school has been part of American education since the early 20th century. And at its core, taking the school bus does something very fundamental — it physically brings students to school each and every morning. In fact, the school bus whisks about 25 million public school students per year to school. Yet, prior to my new study in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, we had little evidence on whether taking the school bus to school (i.e., getting to school) was linked to whether students show up more often to school (i.e., going to school).
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eSchool News
School districts are routinely being overcharged by at least $3 billion on ed-tech products, including hardware and software, each year–the equivalent of 54,000 first-year teacher salaries, according to a new study from the Technology for Education Consortium. The study on ed tech purchasing reveals schools spend an estimated $13.2 billion on ed tech products each year. This includes $4.9 billion on hardware such as tablets, laptops and desktops, along with $8.38 billion on instructional and noninstructional software and content.
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JSTOR Daily
The Trump administration's decision to relax nutrition standards for school lunches introduced by Michelle Obama is the latest development in a food fight that's been going for nearly a century. In 2011, Kristen Hinman looked at the controversies that have dogged school lunch from the beginning. Some American public schools started offering students lunch in the early twentieth century as a way to provide nutritious food and teach good eating habits. Hinman writes that the federal government entered the picture in the 1930's, when both families and farmers were suffering the effects of the Great Depression. The Agriculture Department started buying up agricultural surpluses and sending them to school cafeterias.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
The Washington Post
Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post. The administration would channel part of the savings into its top priority: school choice. It seeks to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.
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Education Week
The U.S. Department of Education is in the thick of reviewing the very first round of state plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. But the Trump White House has been slow to fill positions throughout federal agencies, including at the Education Department. For now, a number of important roles have been temporarily taken by deputy assistant secretaries who are acting as assistant secretaries. And two other key roles—the deputy secretary (who typically oversees operations), and the assistant secretary of planning, evaluation and policy (typically the Chief Wonk) haven't been filled by political appointees, even temporarily.
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Detroit Free Press
On any given day in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, about 100 classes are operating without a permanent teacher — the result of a dire teacher vacancy problem that is taxing schools, teachers, students and principals. As of April 27, the district had 263 teacher vacancies. Of that number, 161 were being filled by long-term substitute teachers, including several dozen that are part of a program that puts them on a quicker track toward full certification.
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Education DIVE
Calvin Baker, the superintendent of Arizona's Vail School District, was running with a colleague from a neighboring district one day and sharing how his staff had taken binders full of curriculum calendars and instructional strategies and put them into a digital format. This was so the district's 19 schools — spread over 425 square miles — could have easier access to the materials.
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Education Week
One out of every 100 special education students was restrained by school personnel or secluded in school from his or her peers in the 2013-2014 school year, presumably to quell behavior that teachers considered disruptive or dangerous. That means nearly 70,000 special education students were restrained or secluded in that school year, the most recent for which data are available. For most students, this happened more than once: States reported more than 200,000 such incidents, so on average, a special education student was restrained or secluded about three times.
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Education Week
The mobile education technology cart might be edging out the computer lab in many districts, according to a new analysis by the Education Week Research Center. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 district administrators and teachers, the center found Google Chromebooks were used more frequently in day-to-day instruction than all PC and Apple desktop and laptop computers combined.
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NAESP
Schools are symbiotic organizations that are stimulated by the push and pull of change. This exciting yet creative tension can be complicated to navigate. High-performing principals know that shared leadership with their assistant principal is absolutely essential for success.
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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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