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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
The Hechinger Report
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia are now using the same math and English standards, but the tests they use to determine how well students have mastered them still vary significantly. One of the goals of the Common Core State Standards was to be able to compare student performance from state to state on a yearly basis. Five years ago, it looked like that would happen. Nearly all Common Core adopters were in at least one of two national consortia that would be creating new exams to accompany the standards, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and Partnership for College and Career Readiness, known as PARCC.
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Brookings
In the wake of the recession, states and districts were dealing with an unprecedented budget crunch. Race to the Top was included in the stimulus package in part to provide temporary relief to education agencies throughout the country. In return for the grants the federal government required states and districts to reform their own policies. Reforms to data systems were among those the federal government pursued. Though the extra funds were welcomed, education leaders were initially wary of their capacity to implement the agreed upon changes. Recent evidence indicates that states and districts have made progress with regard to data capacity issues.
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MindShift
Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler spends a lot of time worrying about how math education in the United States traumatizes kids. Recently, a colleague's 7-year-old came home from school and announced he didn't like math anymore. His mom asked why and he said, "math is too much answering and not enough learning." This story demonstrates how clearly kids understand that unlike their other courses, math is a performative subject, where their job is to come up with answers quickly. Boaler says that if this approach doesn't change, the U.S. will always have weak math education.
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eSchool News
Ask a third grader what she wants to be when she grows up and she might say "a doctor." Adults know that anyone with a doctorate is technically a doctor, but for a young mind their idea of what a doctor is or does is narrow. It is only through repeated exposure to careers that students begin to expand those definitions and begin to think about their futures. At the Kankakee School District in Illinois, where I graduated from and now serve as superintendent, it's a process that begins as early as preschool. Research shows that the earlier and more often you talk with young children about careers, the more students will envision themselves going to college and working in those fields. Without the consistent conversations, a student may never pursue secondary education or have a solid career at all.
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eSchool News
Technology use is increasing, with 4 out of 5 teachers saying they will use classroom technology more frequently during the 2015-2016 school year, according to a survey from Front Row Education, a company that provides adaptive, gamified and data driven education programs. The largest driver of this increase appears to be access to devices, with more than three-fourths of 1,000 surveyed teachers noting that the availability of classroom technology resources at their school is either good (40 percent) or great (37 percent).
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Science Weekly Magazine
Science Weekly Magazine
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Scholastic Administration Magazine
In the past two years, Dan Almeida has seen a steady climb in the number of students on the autism spectrum entering Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts, where he serves as district supervisor of applied behavior analysis services. In 2013, Newton served 250 students with ASD — as of last March, the number stood at 291 of the roughly 12,800 district students. "Newton follows a neighborhood inclusion model very closely," he says. "The goal is for students to walk to a school right near their home. The majority of children on the spectrum are served in their neighborhood schools. To meet the wide range of these students' needs, the district offers various supports — from preschool parent training to a middle school program that helps kids develop social skills."
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BreitBart
Some 76 percent of school psychologists in the state's nearly 700 school districts say Common Core — and the standardized tests associated with it — are associated with more anxiety than local tests, observes a report titled "Anxious for Success: High Anxiety in New York Schools," released jointly by the New York State School Boards Association and the New York State Association of School Psychologists. The report indicates that since the implementation of the Common Core standards and the grades 3-8 tests aligned with them, six in ten school psychologists — or 61 percent — said the level of test anxiety has increased among students. None of the school psychologists said the level of test anxiety has decreased since Common Core.
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Edutopia
Research shows that one of the best ways to engage students in content learning is to incorporate the arts. Because of students' openness to the arts, their motivation remains high, their attention spans tend to be longer and their learning increases — yet teachers sometimes struggle with how to incorporate the arts while maintaining academic integrity. No matter what type of the arts you desire to bring into the classroom — music, visual art, creative writing, dance, etc. — here are five guidelines to help prevent arts integration in the content classroom from simply becoming arts-and-crafts time.
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Brookings
The release of 2015 NAEP scores showed national achievement stalling out or falling in reading and mathematics. The poor results triggered speculation about the effect of Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of standards adopted by more than 40 states since 2010. Critics of Common Core tended to blame the standards for the disappointing scores. Its defenders said it was too early to assess CCSS's impact and that implementation would take many years to unfold. William J. Bushaw, executive director of the National assessment Governing Board, cited "curricular uncertainty" as the culprit. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued that new standards typically experience an "implementation dip" in the early days of teachers actually trying to implement them in classrooms.
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Connected Principals (commentary)
Dan Kerr, a contributor for Connected Principals blog, writes: "So this past week I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I love being an educator, and about how grateful I am to have found a life's work that fills me with such passion and purpose and joy. I love getting up and going to school everyday, and if I'm being honest, I don't quite understand how some people in the world would rather do something else with their lives other than spending their days with kids! Anyway, I decided to put together a non-exhaustive list of the things that I am most grateful for in education, and it is these very things that keep me sprinting to school every morning, and make the happiest educator on the planet."
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News-Medical.Net
Children with amblyopia, commonly known as "lazy eye," may have impaired ocular motor function. This can result in difficulties in activities for which sequential eye movements are important, such as reading. A new study conducted at the Retina Foundation of the Southwest determined that children with amblyopia read more slowly than children with normal vision or with strabismus alone. Their findings are published in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus.
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EdTech Magazine
Education Dive's 2015 State of Education Technology survey polled more than 150 education leaders and teachers to learn how technology is being used in school districts across the country and what challenges to access they face. What they learned was that schools are underfunded and teachers are undertrained, facing environments where the technologies they use aren't always reliable. The survey's results paint a picture of education in flux. As schools continue to transition toward more digital learning efforts, many educators are playing catch-up, learning how to incorporate these new tools within their curriculum.
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The Conversation
Jean Crockett, a contributor for The Conversation, writes: "When Alan joined my class in September, I knew he needed help. So did I. Alan had lived in an orphanage ever since he was an infant and faced many challenges: he was older than the other kids and did not want to play with them. He didn't use words — although he could make sounds. He was very different from his classmates and stayed to himself. But then, every afternoon he was a bundle of energy, imitating the barking of a dog and crawling on the floor around his classmates at circle time. He also had a passion for shredding my teaching materials."
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The Washington Post
A final spork will be tossed unceremoniously into the trash in a New York City school cafeteria sometime next year, ending the 30-year reign of the flimsy plastic fork-spoon combo in the nation's largest school system. The disposable plastic implement has been a mainstay in the city's school cafeterias for a generation, but the spork's meals are numbered there and in public schools in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Orlando. The six districts, which educate 2.8 million children in 4,500 schools, are using their combined purchasing power to replace plastic, disposable sporks with knives, forks and spoons made from compostable materials.
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District Administration Magazine
Analysts expect 3-D printer shipments to double worldwide to nearly 496,500 units in 2016 — in large part due to demand from K-12 schools and universities, according to a new report. 3-D printers — devices that create physical objects from digital plans — are more common in STEM classes than in people's homes, despite manufacturers' initial expectations for the machines. Schools and universities are the primary market drivers for consumer 3-D printers costing under $2,500, according to a September report from Gartner Inc., an independent technology research company.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
After more than a decade, Congress appears to be on the verge of leaving the almost universally unpopular No Child Left Behind Act ... well, behind. Lawmakers have spent months behind the scenes crafting a deal that would scale back the federal role under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — the 14-year-old NCLB law is the latest iteration — for the first time since the early 1980s. The compromise, the Every Student Succeeds Act, sailed through a conference committee this month, with just one dissenting vote, from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who is running for president. It's expected to be on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives next week. The measure's prospects in the Senate are rosy, but it could run into trouble with House conservatives.
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EdSource
The state's system of school construction and upkeep is inadequate and inequitable, with districts serving low-income students more often underfunding construction, then overspending on patching up facilities that needed major renovations, a new research study has found. "California must bolster — not recede from — its role in the state-local funding partnership for K-12 school facilities," concluded the paper by Jeffrey Vincent, deputy director of the Center for Cities + Schools in the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at UC Berkeley.
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NPR
A generation ago, a high school diploma could open doors, especially to well-paying manufacturing jobs. But today, with technology radically reshaping the U.S. economy, many of those doors have closed. The high school diploma is as important as ever — but as a stepping stone to a higher degree, no longer as a destination. That's one reason Indiana lawmakers are rewriting their state's graduation requirements. They want to make the path to a diploma more challenging and the diploma itself more valuable. Changes could include requiring students to take more math credits and a broader range of electives. The requirements would also apply to all students, and that's raising concern that some kids simply wouldn't be able to meet them.
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The Huffington Post
California is leading the way in making sure that young kids don't get pushed out of school for minor misbehavior. A new study out Monday from UCLA's Civil Rights Project shows that districts in the Golden State sharply reduced the number of suspensions given to kids between 2011 and 2014. At the same time that suspension rates went down in many areas, academic achievement improved — suggesting that the move away from harsh discipline practices benefitted schools. The study comes at a time when schools are facing increased scrutiny for perpetuating the so-called school-to-prison pipeline by employing tactics that push students out of school and make them more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.
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NAESP
Pedro Noguera, a nationally recognized voice on urban education reform and speaker at NAESP's 2016 Conference, knows how important the principal's role is in helping achieve equity in schools. In the latest edition of NAESP Radio, Noguera sat down with NAESP Executive Director Gail Connelly to discuss what great principals are doing to drive student success.
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NAESP
When children lose a parent or other close family member, they mourn that person. Most school professionals understand and expect this. However, there are additional losses related to the death that can affect children deeply. These are often less familiar to families and school professionals alike. The death is considered a primary loss. Events and changes that occur as the result of the death are considered secondary losses.
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