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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
School Leaders Now (commentary)
"As a new principal, is it OK for me to visit classrooms informally just to see what's going on?" Absolutely! Visiting classrooms is a great way to get to know teachers and kids and to see what's happening in the school on a daily basis. However, you should be aware of some basic guidelines so that teachers will welcome your visit and not see it as an intrusion.
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Education DIVE
Technology is changing the way the entire world operates — from commerce to transportation, there is not an industry that is not being transformed by the digital revolution. Education is no exception. Education technology provides numerous possibilities for interactive teaching and learning, as well as increasing process efficiency in the administrative offices. But research has shown that most administrators are entirely reliant upon their vendor relationships to guide the buying process; few actually know what they really need for their schools, and many admit to deploying technological solutions before they've fully identified a problem and laid out a strategy.
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eSchool News
Involving parents in their children's progress in the classroom has long been shown to significantly increase student outcomes. With parent engagement top of mind in many school districts — partly because the Every Student Succeeds Act requires it — teachers can benefit from these best practices from peers for using education technology to get, and keep, parents engaged.
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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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Edutopia
As we work daily to develop the skills of young readers, writers, speakers, listeners and thinkers, we constantly consider this: What will engage them? How will I relate the school content to their lives? As teachers striving to be culturally relevant, we do our best to include relatable materials into our curricula — articles, media, song lyrics, speeches, websites, and film and documentary clips. For many teachers, this is exciting stuff, but for others — particularly new teachers who already feel overwhelmed by planning, grading, and management — it's worrisome. Finding relevant, engaging material to use with students definitely takes time and effort.
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By: Sheilamary Koch (commentary)
 If you've ever studied a new language, you know how overwhelming it can be to absorb all that new vocabulary, pronounce things right and correctly use the grammar. Singing a language can make it easier to learn, according to research that found people who sang words from a foreign language instead of speaking them were twice as good at remembering them later. Many early childhood educators already take advantage of such links in L1 activities where songs are an integral part of lessons.
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The Christian Science Monitor
Science: coming soon to a school near you. A growing number of public schools in low-income areas have begun using "mobile makerspaces" housed in refurbished school buses and other vehicles to expose students to the joys of science, technology, engineering, and math. The rolling initiative — which would make Ms. Frizzle, driver of "The Magic School Bus" proud — follows a broader trend of cash-strapped districts turning to mobile classrooms to provide students with opportunities too costly for individual schools to afford.
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eSchool News
Technology has begun to transform how K-12 leaders track and manage student behavior, giving administrators real-time access to discipline information in the palm of their hand. But too often, the emphasis is on the negative behaviors students exhibit, such as being rude or late to class. Cedar Creek Middle School in Texas is flipping that idea on its head, using a student behavior management platform called Hero to track positive as well as negative behaviors in real time — and school leaders are noticing a significant change in student conduct, and overall school culture, as a result.
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eSchool News
Instead of rewarding students for how many problems they solve, here's what schools should be focusing on instead.
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Education Week
Public schools have more classroom technology and faster internet connections than ever before, and teachers and students alike report using the digital tools at their disposal more frequently than in years past. But a new analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress survey data by the Education Week Research Center highlights two troubling trends: Despite the promise of building "21st century skills," such as creativity and problem-solving, students report using computers in school most often for activities that involve rote practice.
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By: Bob Kowalski (commentary)
 A movement is afoot to remove homework from schools, and — believe it or not — it's not being led by a group of defiant fifth-graders. Parents and teachers across the country are questioning the value of the extra work and the strain on the schedules of students and their families. In some cases, teachers are leading the troops in what you might call a different type of "class" warfare. Social media even helped advance the cause when a letter from a Texas parent to her child's teacher went viral.
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EdTech Magazine
With more schools embracing technology to tailor learning to the needs of each student, the Future Ready Schools initiative is ensuring that the 9 million kids in rural public school districts aren't left behind on the trend. After conducting research, FRS adapted its guide to help schools implement personalized learning approaches specifically for rural schools.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
Recently, three states — Delaware, Nevada and New Mexico — received official feedback from the U.S. Department of Education on their plans for implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. And, the feds went a lot further than many guessed they would, given U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' rhetoric about local control, and the Trump administration's own decision to ask states only for bare-bones information about their plans.
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Austin American-Statesman
Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into a law a bill that scales back the way the state will grade school districts and campuses. House Bill 22, which addresses the A-F accountability system, reduces the number of categories from five to three under which school districts and campuses are evaluated. It also postpones implementing the system for schools by a year until 2019, but school districts will still be evaluated under the A-F system by next year as was originally planned.
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The Record
Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto have reached a compromise on a new way for funding public schools, ending a months-long standoff between the powerful Democrats and possibly averting a government shutdown. Whether Gov. Chris Christie, who has called for a new way to finance public education, will support the plan as a state budget deadline looms this month is unclear.
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Education World
Parents of students in New York have mobilized against the state's heavy standardized testing in recent years with as many as 20 percent of the elementary and middle schools' student population sitting out of the annual tests. Education policymakers have apparently heard the growing complaint loud and clear and announced earlier this week they would be scaling back the standardized testing from three days per subject to just two.
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The Wichita Eagle
Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a school finance bill that had comfortably passed the Legislature, meeting a deadline the Supreme Court set to provide more money for schools by the end of this month. The next step will be for the court to evaluate whether the finance plan meets the state’s constitutional duty to provide suitable funding for education. The court earlier decided that block grant financing Brownback championed two years ago was inadequate.
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NAESP
Throughout its 95-year history, NAESP has called upon its leaders to hold true to its mission, while astutely assessing and acting on the specific challenges and opportunities of their times. By any measure, the past decade has been a momentous period: Demographic tipping points are fundamentally altering society and the workplace, the digital revolution continues to accelerate, and repercussions are still being felt from a historic economic recession. And public school leaders, committed to educating every student, are experiencing unprecedented pressures on multiple fronts that make their jobs more demanding than ever before.
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NAESP
What is global education? How can global competences be cultivated? Why does global competence matter? Join the conversation on NAESP Radio with CEO of Participate David Young as he discusses the significance of global education with NAESP Executive Director Gail Connelly.
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