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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
Education World
A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has used data from both state budget documents and the U.S. Census Bureau as well as enrollment figures from the National Center for Education Statistics to analyze public investment in K-12 schools. The report found that over the past decade, at least 23 states are providing less funding support for elementary and secondary schools than when the Great Recession took hold in 2008.
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The Hechinger Report
When it comes to influencing education policy and cultivating innovative schools, all eyes are on the states. A new federal law hands more control to state leaders, untethering them from rules that threatened dire consequences for failing to achieve certain test scores. But in return for this freedom, states must come up with their own ways of ensuring that their schools give all students a high-quality, equitable education.
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District Administration Magazine
Alaska recently graduated its first class of Russian dual-language students who began the program in kindergarten. That's just one example of the growing diversity of language-immersion programs in U.S. schools. While Spanish remains a constant, there is an increased demand nationally for dual-language programs in Portuguese, German, French and Mandarin, says Pete Swanson, president of American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and associate professor of foreign language at Georgia State University.
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By: Howard Margolis (commentary)
 This is bad, and it's far too common: Struggling learners fail to generalize what they've learned in class. When it's needed in other places, it seems "lost" or "foreign" to them. In this example, what Marco seems to have mastered in his resource program, he doesn't apply outside of class. Like many struggling learners, he has problems with a mysterious sounding concept: stimulus generalization. Marco's mother — a composite of many parents I've known — embodies the problem.
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Star Tribune
David Boucher's kindergarten classroom was a cacophony of vowel recitations, rhyming words, vocabulary drills and sentence decoding. It was Day 34 of school at Folwell School in Minneapolis. The little ones should be reading by June. Memphis stumbled in her read-aloud turn when she reached the last word of the sentence, "The leaves are brown." With some coaching from Boucher, she proudly pronounced the color.
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By: Brian Stack (commentary)
 I recently had the opportunity to attend a large networking event with business leaders from my community. When I asked them what we (the school system) could be doing to better prepare students for their workplaces, I was not surprised to learn that employers are less concerned about a potential employee's academic preparation but care more about their "employability" skills. Employers want to know how well potential employees will work on a team.
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NPR
For Ross Roberts, it was a lack of resources that drove him from the classroom. For Danielle Painton, it was too much emphasis on testing. For Sergio Gonzalez, it was a nasty political environment. Welcome to the U.S. teaching force, where the "I'm outta here" rate is an estimated 8 percent a year — twice that of high-performing countries like Finland or Singapore. And that 8 percent is a lot higher than other professions. The teaching force is "a leaky bucket, losing hundreds of thousands of teachers each year — the majority of them before retirement age," says a recent report from the Learning Policy Institute.
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eSchool News
Seven universities along with state and K-12 district partners will participate in a new $47 million initiative to develop models for improving university principal preparation programs. The program also will examine state policy to see if it could be strengthened to encourage higher-quality training statewide. The Wallace Foundation’s University Principal Preparation Initiative builds on 15 years of Wallace-supported research and experience about what makes for effective principals and their “pre-service” training at universities. The initiative seeks to explore how university programs can improve this training so it reflects the evidence on how best to prepare effective principals; these insights will be shared to benefit the broader field.
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[FreshGrade Education Inc.]
Encourage your students to guide their own learning and begin to master their destinies. In this free eBook from FreshGrade, you’ll learn how to reclaim assessment, create purposeful assessment, and implement innovative approaches with real examples of innovation from schools across the United States. 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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THE Journal
While plenty of surveys examine the use of technology in schools from the teacher or student perspective, here's one that looks at the subject from the parents' point of view. The Learning Assembly polled 1,000 K-12 public school parents around the United States on the use of education technology in their students' schools. The bottom line: They're not overly impressed.
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Parenting
More and more researchers, educators and parents are realizing that not only is playground time good for kids — it is crucial. Here's why it just may be the fourth "R" in school, and what you can do to make sure children get a healthy dose of downtime.
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Read the Book! Book the Training!
Improve instruction, improve student performance.
Book your staff development now - (832) 477-5323.
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Edutopia
Max is one of my sixth-grade students. He meanders into the classroom each day carrying in a past filled with tragedy. His mother was murdered last spring and his father almost exactly a year before her. Now living with his alcoholic grandmother, Max continues to struggle with the aftermath of these tragedies.
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EdTech Magazine
As schools introduce new technology and rely more on data analytics to inform academic decisions, concerns about protecting privacy and keeping students secure online tend to rise. The federal government — along with some states and individual school districts — has instituted regulations like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the Children's Internet Protection Act to ensure privacy and security for K–12 students. But sometimes it's difficult to figure out what it all means.
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By: Bambi Majumdar (commentary)
 A barbershop in Michigan, called The Fuller Cut, shot into the limelight recently — not for its haircuts, but for innovative discounts offered to kids who read out loud. Kids are also quizzed on what they have read, which helps them comprehend and retain the story better. It's a novel idea for the child of the present age who has learned to pick up the iPad instinctively, rather than a book. This is the challenge parents face today — how to get their children to read.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
The U.S. Department of Education doled out $427 million for the very last round of School Improvement Grant funds. The program, which has gotten more than $7 billion over the course of the Obama administration, yielded decidedly mixed results when it comes to student achievement, was eliminated under the Every Student Succeeds Act.
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District Administration Magazine
A new series of toolkits designed to help administrators meet next-generation high school standards has been released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national education policy and advocacy organization for underserved secondary school students. The toolkits (available for free download as PowerPoint documents) de-mystify the Every Student Succeeds Act, explaining many of the law's main components — particularly those that relate to educational funding. Administrators can also find guidelines to help them explain the details of ESSA — such as when preparing for a school board meeting or having a conversation with teachers.
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Education Week
Tax returns, confidential emails and unwanted groping has come up more often than K-12 education this election season. But that actually has a big upside, some experts say. When an issue gets dragged onto th presidential stage, it becomes politicized, giving candidates' less room for what may end up being necessary compromise on sticky issues like charter school expansions, said Conor Williams, a senior researcher in the New America Foundation's education policy program.
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The Des Moines Register
Iowa school districts are sitting on more than $145 million in funding that frustrated superintendents say they can't spend because of legislative restrictions. The earmarked money has built up in dozens of funds over the years, growing from $130 million in 2013, according to a Des Moines Register review of state data. Now, education officials are lobbying to loosen the spending restrictions so they can use the money where they say it is needed most, rather than watching the categorized accounts build up year after year while they scramble to find funding in other areas.
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NAESP
"Of all the items in a principal's professional toolkit that support success, we think the most important is voice — a voice that is authentic, insightful, considerate, and confident." These are the words of Russell Quaglia and Peter DeWitt, whose recent book, "Principal Voice: Listen, Learn, Lead", addresses the challenge of principals actually being heard, not just listened to. To have a real impact on student achievement, the authors say, principals' voices must be informed and supported by the full range of stakeholders.
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NAESP
After-school time adds two hours to the regular school day, time that benefits both struggling and gifted students. For some students, the school day may end when the bell rings. But peek into my school at 4 p.m. on most days of the week, and you'll find dozens of students immersed in collaborative, hands-on projects in which the students are a part of the planning and design. Here at Crooked Oak Public Schools in Oklahoma City, we have a thriving after-school program.
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