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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
Education DIVE
When education insiders pick apart the factors that make a school successful, there's often a lot of conversation about academic rigor, resources, quality of teachers and even, in some cases, the socio-economic makeup of the students within the school. But the success of a school is as dependent on the principal as any other single determining factor one could list. If there's a great emphasis on continuous learning environments for students, it stands to reason that equally important is the professional development and continued education of the adults in the school, too.
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eSchool News
Determining the right mix of traditional and digital tools to best engage with parents and district stakeholders remains a primary challenge for district communications, according to a new report. A large part of a school district's ability to implement successful initiatives or pass bonds lies in its communications and its ability to connect with community members. Now, a new report from Blackboard outlines the different roles district communications officials play in today's schools. The results reflect the increasingly important yet challenging role of communications in today's K-12 districts.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Peter Siegel, a coontributor for Edutopia, writes: "Years ago, following a holiday concert I had just conducted at a small Vermont elementary school, a parent approached me with a complaint. 'Christmas is the reason for the season,' he said. 'So why can't you sing about Jesus?' Public school teachers know that the answer is tied up in the U.S. Constitution, but the question did prompt me to ask myself a question that I still ponder today. Why do so many teachers find it hard to teach academically and meaningfully about all the holidays in a public school setting?"
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Education Week
A group of computer science experts released a framework today for what K-12 students should know about the subject and what they should be able to do in the field. The Association for Computing Machinery, Code.org, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Cyber Innovation Center and the National Math and Science Initiative developed the K-12 Computer Science Framework, which is a core set of concepts and practices for teaching rather than curriculum standards.
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MindShift
How does mastery happen? For most of human history, learning in middle childhood meant apprenticeship, not school. Children learned to master skills informally inside the family, or outside the family, more formally and later. Most people were foragers or farmers, and foraging and farming children learned by helping out — they still do. Children also learned more specialized skills by becoming apprentices to master tradesmen and artisans.
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Edutopia
It is often said that a sign of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results each time. This sums up how most American schools are dealing with the homework issue. Not only does homework impact students but it also impacts their families. It is common for students and families to feel that they don't have the time it takes to maintain a healthy balance between work and the rest of their lives. Family time that could be spent getting outdoors, visiting friends and relatives, and relaxing is being unnecessarily burdened by the large amount of homework kids have to do.
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USA Today
New research from Google shows that black students are less likely to have computer science classes in school and are less likely to use computers at home even though they are 1.5 times more interested in studying computer science than their white peers. The findings are part a report released by Google in partnership with Gallup that puts the spotlight on the racial and gender gap in K-12 computer science education. Google says its aim with the research, which surveyed thousands of students, parents, teachers, principals and superintendents, is to increase the numbers of women, blacks and Latinos in computer science.
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[FreshGrade Education Inc.]
In this eBook, leaders in education share their best practices and experiences with portfolios and assessment. You'll learn how to save time for educators, empower students to own their learning, implement innovative assessment practices, enhance student outcomes, and actively engage parents in the learning journey. EdTech RoundUp described FreshGrade as uniquely combining student-led portfolios with flexible, custom assessment and parent engagement in one. FreshGrade is used by teachers, parents, and students in all 50 states and in more than 70 countries around the world.
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MindShift
Students are doing more reading on digital devices than they ever have before. Not only are many teachers using tablets and computers for classroom instruction, but many state tests are now administered on computers, adding incentive for teachers to teach digital reading strategies. But casual digital reading on the internet has instilled bad habits in many students, making it difficult for them to engage deeply with digital text in the same way they do when reading materials printed on paper.
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The Atlantic
Across the United States, up to one in five children suffers from a mental disorder in a given year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This equates to more than 17 million young people who meet criteria for disorders that affect their ability to learn, behave and express their emotions. Giving children access to mental-health resources early in their education, however, can play a key role in mitigating negative consequences later in life, said David Anderson, the senior director of the ADHD and Behavior Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute.
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By: Sheilamary Koch (commentary)
 Ask primary students what their favorite school subject is and most will say, "Recess!" As adults we may laugh at this response and say, "I meant just real subjects." But it's no joke. From the students' point of view, recess is a time to be with friends, run around and have fun doing what they want to. Play — on the playground, in the classroom and after school — is still essential to children's mental, emotional and physical well-being at this stage of their lives.
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Education World
In perfect timing for National Bullying Prevention Month, a group of researchers from Norway performed observations in over 20 schools to find that despite the narrative that relational bullying is a "mean girl" phenomenon, boys are just as likely to be exposed. For those unfamiliar, relational bullying is a non-overt form of bullying that happens over time and frequently goes unnoticed by parents and teachers, making intervention difficult.
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EdTech Magazine
These best practices from a New Jersey school for students with disabilities outline four ways wearable tech can head to the classroom.
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District Administration Magazine
Craig Jones discovered the difficulty of providing personalized learning to a large class when he taught science at a Los Angeles USD middle school. With 10 lab stations set up across the classroom — each with its own objectives — monitoring each students' learning was virtually impossible. Jones sought to solve the problem. After leaving the district, he helped develop Formative — a student response system launched in 2015 that allows teachers to watch, on their computers, how each student responds to questions on mobile devices.
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Michigan State University via Science Daily
The anxiety that comes with feeling like an outsider in the classroom can hinder students' learning and, ironically, teachers could be making it worse, according to a new study by a Michigan State University researcher.
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eSchool News
Student data privacy is quite a different topic from the headlines most people read concerning data breaches. It is not about malicious intruders hacking or stealing credentials to get into a system to steal corporate intellectual property or records to sell on the dark web. Student data privacy concerns, specifically, center on the misuse of personally identifiable information, known by its acronym PII. This can be knowingly done for gain — i.e. marketing or future sales — or it can be done with good intentions, as in capturing and using data about an individual to deliver more tailored learning experiences. Even if being done in the aggregate, there are still concerns of misuse.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
Spending on the nation's public schools has gone up slightly, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, with state spending on K-12 increasing at exactly the same rate as federal spending has gone down. In a blog post, NCES reported that the amount of money spent per pupil in elementary and secondary schools rose by 1.2 percent from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2014, up to $11,066 per student, after declining from fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2013.
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Education DIVE
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, first passed in 1965, is at its heart a piece of civil rights legislation. Its whole purpose is to provide federal funds to states and districts to overcome disadvantages faced by students who have traditionally fallen through the cracks or been intentionally ignored. In the latest rewrite of the law, which turned No Child Left Behind into Every Student Succeeds, there are some key provisions that shift the way schools will have to identify, serve, test and report information about students who do not speak English.
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The Washington Post
There are growing teacher shortages in various states across the country (despite some media reports that insist otherwise) and the problem looks like it is only going to get worse. According to a recent study, titled "A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand and Shortages in the U.S.": "Tens of thousands of teachers were hired in the fall of 2015 on emergency or temporary credentials to meet these needs, and the same pattern has emerged as schools opened in 2016. In addition to hiring individuals who are not prepared to teach, districts and schools facing shortages have a small number of undesirable options: They can increase class sizes, cancel classes, use short-term substitutes, or assign teachers from other fields to fill vacancies."
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