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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
District Administration Magazine
Any public district transitioning to an integrated digital curriculum needs time, patience and support from top leadership. Let's face it, digital content — from the Khan Academy to streaming videos to adaptive learning applications — has enveloped K-12 education. While some district leaders have only begun replacing printed learning materials with the new technology, other districts are going entirely digital.
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U.S. News & World Report
If you follow the railroad tracks about an hour southwest of Richmond, beyond rolling green fields dotted with yellow buds of spring, down wide and winding country roads, past faded barns, some overgrown with climbing weeds and others slumping towards earth, you'll find the Nottoway County School Board Office. The central office oversees the school district's 2,200 students, more than 30 percent of whom live in poverty. For a community with such an astounding concentration of poor children, it's done a good job preparing students academically — especially considering one in four adults here don't have a high school diploma, and only 12 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher.
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MindShift
Researchers are in the first year of a three-year-study on how mindfulness programs affect the academic performance of children in 30 high poverty Chicago schools. The researchers will follow approximately 2,000 students in kindergarten, first and second grade to see how programs meant to teach students calming strategies — like meditation or mindful drawing — could help academic achievement.
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By: Debra Josephson Abrams
 In my previous article, I wrote about the value of Wordsmith.org, a website that offers 22 years (and counting) worth of linguistic goodies in one simple package. Wordsmith.org offers "A Word a Day," a daily email of theme-based words, their definition(s), pronunciation, usage and etymology. A recent theme — "Playing with Words" — inspired me to develop activities based on the words. This month, I've developed a pangram activity.
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Improve instruction, improve student performance.
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Education Week
It's not often that special education research gets attention from more than teachers and other academics. But it's also not often that research purports to upend decades of accepted wisdom in the field — and also takes direct aim at race-related policy issues currently under debate at the federal level. In 2015, education professors Paul L. Morgan and George Farkas published a peer-reviewed analysis stating that there is clear bias in the way students are identified for special education.
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The Atlantic
From New York to Utah, U.S. schools have seen a steady rise in bilingual education. Dual-language immersion programs first appeared in the U.S. in the 1960s to serve Spanish-speaking students in Florida. Since then, the demand — and controversy — surrounding these programs has been widespread, and they now address the needs of more than 5 million students who are English language learners in the country's public-school system.
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EdTech Magazine
Learning opportunities experienced both inside and outside the classroom influence a student's technology aptitude. That finding and others come from the Nation's Report Card for Technology and Engineering Literacy assessment. Published in late May by the National Assessment of Education Progress, the report card relies on results from a 2014 scenario-based assessment of more than 21,000 eighth-graders to show how students use digital tools to solve real-world problems.
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Education Next
Picture this: A student wears a set of goggles that transport her from a classroom in Athens, Georgia, to the Parthenon, 5,600 miles away in Athens, Greece. In an interactive, 3-D world, she peers up and down each of the 17 columns on the temple's side and examines the fluted shafts. She notes that they have no bases. It's easy to understand the differences between Ionic and Doric architecture here: rather than relying on textbook descriptions, those differences come to life before her eyes.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
If you skimmed the U.S. Department of Education's 190-plus page proposed regulations for accountability under the Every Student Succeeds Act, you probably know that the public has until Aug. 1 to submit comments on the draft. In particular, though, the department wants to know what folks think of its proposal on setting goals for English language proficiency. Under ESSA, states will have to include schools' progress in this area as part of a school's overall rating.
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Chicago Tribune
Chicago Public Schools won't open in the fall if state government fails to approve an education budget, CPS chief Forrest Claypool said. "Chicago schools would not open, and I suspect most of the schools in the state would not open," Claypool said in a telephone interview a day after divisions among Democrats who control the House and Senate prevented passage of a school funding plan before the end of the legislative session. CPS is low on cash and has "no ability to access capital markets" because of its junk credit ratings, Claypool said. Many statewide school districts face their own financial woes and likely would face the same predicament if the state fails to provide funding, Claypool said.
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Education Week
The New York state education department announced it was releasing 75 percent of the multiple-choice items from its 2016 Common Core-aligned math and English/language arts tests, and that it was doing so earlier than usual to give teachers a chance to review them before the end of the school year. For the previous two years, the department had posted just half of the test questions for the public to see, and did so at the end of the summer.
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eSchool News
When Catherine Gillach started her career as a principal 16 years ago, the realm of social media had yet to get off the ground. The founding of Facebook was four years away. It would be 2006 before students were tweeting and another five years after that they would be sending pictures that exist for only seconds at time on Snapchat. "When I started there was nothing like this at all even in existence," Gillach said. "I would say, probably the last seven or eight years ... is when social media and all the branches of that took off. That's when it really started to impact the schools."
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NAESP
NAESP's Best Practices for Better Schools Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, MD, July 6-8, is less than 30 days away! If you haven't registered yet, please do so today. Take a few minutes to preview the some of the outstanding sessions on preparing for the implementation of ESSA, ensuring high quality Pre-K-3 programs, strengthening effective principal leadership, extending learning with model after school programs and throughout summer, and so much more. View the Itinerary Planner to search or browse events, create your own schedule, and plan your personal activities during the conference. The deadline for housing is June 15. Book now to ensure you get the NAESP discount.
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NAESP
Parent engagement is one of the most important pieces to an administrator's job, and there are so many ways to do it. In many conversations I have with other school administrators, one of the most common questions that arise is, "What do you use that works?" There are multiple apps and services that allow for communication between school and parent. At St. Mary Catholic School in Rockwood, Michigan, we utilize the apps listed below and our parents are so thankful to have the insight into our building and our classrooms.
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