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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
The New York Times
For years, there has been a steady stream of headlines about the soaring mental health needs of college students and their struggles with anxiety and lack of resilience. Now, a growing number of educators are trying to bolster emotional competency not on college campuses, but where they believe it will have the greatest impact: in elementary schools. In many communities, elementary teachers, guidance counselors and administrators are embracing what is known as social and emotional learning, or S.E.L., a process through which people become more aware of their feelings and learn to relate more peacefully to others.
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eSchool News
More than 40 percent of surveyed Chicago public school principals plan to leave their positions in the next 3 years, and 25 percent said they plan to leave within the next year–data suggesting that the city is losing its principals too soon, before they can effect change in their schools. During a City Club of Chicago event downtown on Nov. 3, The Chicago Public Education Fund (The Fund) released a comprehensive report on the state of principal quality in the city's public schools. The report, titled Chicago's Fight to Keep Top Principals, is based on survey results from 423 principals within Chicago's public schools, representing 65 percent of the city's district-run and charter school principals.
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By: Brian Stack
 In our house, homework must be completed before anyone gets to go outside to play with friends. Through the years, we have found some homework assignments are appropriate and effective. Some assignments, however, amount to little more than "busy work" that does not challenge them with deeper understanding. So what is the purpose of homework? Is it to reinforce skills from the classroom? Is it to provide additional practice? Is it to develop appropriate work study practices?
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The Washington Post (commentary)
Judith A. Myers-Walls, a professor emerita at Purdue University, has studied the impact of political violence on children and offers these tips for both parents and educators in how to handle the Paris attacks: "Assume that elementary school children have heard something about the attacks. If they haven't mentioned it on their own, a parent or a teacher might bring it up. First, find out what they know. For the youngest kids, maybe ask them to draw pictures of what they think happened or have them make up a story or a play. If they seem less aware or less interested, you might not want to go into depth."
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District Administration Magazine
Teaching research skills once meant asking students to turn stacks of library books into essays on the poetry of Emily Dickinson or the causes of the Civil War. But today, it's just as likely to mean asking second-graders to design a museum exhibit on the physics of flight, encouraging a 10th-grader to make the case for backyard chicken coops, or helping a high school senior develop a water-usage spreadsheet for the county public works department. Whatever the project, educators agree that teaching students to find reliable sources, synthesize research findings and communicate results is more urgent than ever in a world where every blogger with a keyboard can pose as an expert.
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Science Weekly Magazine
Science Weekly Magazine
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The Washington Post (commentary)
How do you explain to hundreds of grade school children that a beloved kindergarten teacher with breast cancer is dying? That's the start of the following post, which takes up the rarely discussed subject of why it is important that teachers be equipped to discuss death with students who are confronted with the loss of a family member or friend and come to school trying to make sense of it. This was written by Kelly Michelson works in the pediatric critical care medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and is the editor of the Greater Illinois Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition newsletter.
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Education Week
The 2014-2015 school year marked a big change for many states because they switched to tests that for the first time reflect the Common Core State Standards. These are the scores from state-mandated mathematics and English/language arts tests given in 2014-2015 and in 2013-2014 (or the most recent previous year available).
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The Hechinger Report
What's the difference between kids who remain at the bottom of the class and those who surge ahead to the top half? It might be as little as 4.7 minutes, in the case of reading. According to a report on almost 10 million U.S. schoolchildren who practice reading using an online software program called Accelerated Reader, a shockingly small amount of additional daily reading separated the weak students who stay at the bottom from those who catch up over the course of a school year.
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THE Journal
A frequent conflict that educators have with their IT departments is over access to content for students — content that's often being blocked at the behest of administrators and parents. And many IT directors are becoming less interested in being stuck in the middle. But often IT directors who want more control are trying to protect educators and students from not only what can be seen on the Internet but often what is not seen (viruses, adware and malware). Is there a compromise that can address all the needs while still protecting everyone?
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The Atlantic
At her Moraga, California, junior high school, Rachel Jackson was a safe-school ambassador, part of a program that trains student volunteers to intervene in bullying situations among their peers. SSA runs throughout the school year and requires students and teachers to work together, two elements of effective anti-bullying programs, experts say. But in practice, Jackson remembers, student apathy eroded some of the potential.
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National Journal
The traditional yellow school bus is not an option for the majority of public-school students in Washington, D.C. For many families who encounter neighborhood school closures or who elect to attend schools outside their neighborhoods, walking may not be an option, either. This means that some low-income families struggle to find transportation to school, while balancing jobs, child care and other responsibilities. In the District, about 75 percent of students attend a school outside their neighborhoods. As school choice drives up that number in cities across the country, school districts will have to consider how to accommodate them since fewer are walking.
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Graceland University is ranked #5 in the country for Online Masters of Education programs by US News and World Report. We have a 98% graduation rate and 97% would recommend our program to a friend. We have 4 programs to meet the needs of practically any teacher.
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eSchool News (commentary)
Rich Czyz, a contributor for eSchool News, writes: "During the past few years, there has been a major shift in instruction for students. We have figured out how to effectively reach them through engaging activities, allowing for student voice and choice. We have also seen a number of educators who are pushing this same shift in professional development. I believe that it is absolutely necessary to engage teachers in professional learning that is relevant to their daily teaching while being able to provide numerous on-demand opportunities for professional learning. In order to meet the ISTE Standards for Teachers, teachers are asked to engage in professional growth and leadership opportunities. Furthermore, the high standards set by the ISTE Standards for both students and teachers demand that teachers be engaged, curious and dynamic professionals. Teachers need and want new and valid approaches to PD."
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The Washington Post
The D.C. Council wants to study how parents' incarceration affects their children's performance in schools across the District and the types of supports that might help these students. More than half of adults who are incarcerated in state and federal prisons have children at home under the age of 18, according to a national report. "Often in the District of Columbia, we talk about the needs of returning citizens [from prison], but we have not explored the needs of their children," said D.C. Council member David Grosso, chairman of the education committee, at a hearing to discuss a new bill that would launch a study.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
The New York Times
With the Obama administration's signature school reform program coming to an end and battered by politics, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, came to a once-failing high school in one of this city's most troubled neighborhoods to highlight the progress that has been made here and across the country. But he also encouraged states and schools to keep their ambitions high at a time when support is flagging for common standards and common tests that were supposed to provide a uniform comparison of school performance across state lines.
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Disability Scoop
Beyond offering a free appropriate public education, individualized education programs for students with disabilities should meet grade-level requirements, federal education officials say. In guidance, the U.S. Department of Education said that all IEPs should conform to "the state's academic content standards for the grade in which the child is enrolled." The directive comes ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — the federal law requiring appropriate school services for children with disabilities — later this month. "In the 40 years since this law was enacted, we have moved beyond simply providing children and youth with disabilities access to the school house," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
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"The Fundamental 5 improves instruction. The power of these practices will transform classrooms and schools," E. Don Brown, NASSP past president. Order now at Amazon.com
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By: Archita Datta Majumdar
 National education organizations have launched an intensive social media and digital ad campaign to push Congress to act on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The legislation has already seen much development and simply needs that final push toward the revised law. The current, much-despised version of ESEA, also called the No Child Left Behind Act, has perhaps received more criticism than any of its predecessors.
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Democrat & Chronicle
The age-old requirement of No. 2 pencils for school tests may soon be a thing of the past. When New York students sit for state-mandated "field tests" next spring, some schools will eschew the traditional pencil-and-paper exams that have been offered for decades and opt for tests offered on desktop computers, laptops or tablets instead. The field exams — which don't count for anything but are used to try out questions for future state-mandated tests — will serve as an experiment of sorts as the state begins a long-awaited shift toward computer-based testing.
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eSchool News
Managing staff and student safety consists of many aspects, which often leads districts to contract services with several vendors to get the job done and can lead to a management headache. In order to consolidate and improve their safety programming, Teton County School District #1 in Jackson, Wyoming, is partnering with PublicSchoolWORKS to use its' EmployeeSafe and StudentWatch suites. Also, Teton CUSD #1 is the first district in Wyoming to use StudentWatch's Student Behavior Management System to report and track both positive and negative student behaviors.
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NAESP
NAESP continues to lead the charge for early education recognition and inclusion in ESEA reauthorization as noted in a letter sent to leaders on Capitol Hill about the need to retain the Early Learning Alignment and Improvement Grant program in conference negotiations. Key Democrat and Republican education leaders are forging ahead with conference committee talks to finalize a bipartisan agreement, known as a conference "framework." The early childhood-focused grants promote alignment of standards, curriculum and instruction across the Pre-K-3 continuum in school districts across the country.
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NAESP
The current NAESP Bylaws provide that the current terms of office for Officers and Directors of the NAESP Board begin July 1. At the October meeting of the Board of Directors the Bylaws were changed to provide that terms of office will begin Aug. 1. The change was made to avoid situations where one board term would be expiring and a new board term beginning around the same time as the NAESP annual conference. This change means that all current members of the board will have their terms extended by one month.
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