(Jack's note: This issue of the HML Post was intended to be a brief set of articles and research, because of the holiday season. Well, that didn't happen. Happy New Year!)
Happy New Year from the Officers and Directors of the Horace Mann League.
Andy Goldstein, a parent and teacher in Florida, wrote this story below and recited it before the School Board of Palm Beach County. The story is a cautionary tale about ALEC's involvement in our public schools.
For those who may not know, ALEC is an organization that connects corporations and politicians behind closed doors. T
hey draft model legislation (designed to boost corporate profit) and bring these laws to our states. Incentives for many of their favored policies, including Pay for Success, competency-based education, and - of course - high stakes testing - were written into the latest version of ESEA, which was signed into law this month. (
Read more.)
It's time again for an annual recap of education news. As usual, I don't presume to say it's all-encompassing, so I hope you'll take time to share your own choices. I'll list the ones I think are the best first, followed by the worst. It's too hard to rank them within those categories, so I'm not listing them in any order.
Billionaire Eli Broad began gearing up for a $500 million campaign to create nearly 300 new charter schools, which would irreparably damage the Los Angeles public school system. (Read more.)
The 2015 Monitoring the Future survey (MTF) shows decreasing use of a number of substances, including cigarettes, alcohol, prescription opioid pain relievers, and synthetic cannabinoids ("synthetic marijuana"). Other drug use remains stable, including marijuana, with continued high rates of daily use reported among 12th graders, and ongoing declines in perception of its harms.
The MTF survey measures drug use and attitudes among eighth, 10th, and 12th graders, and is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The survey has been conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor since 1975.
For the first time, daily marijuana use exceeds daily tobacco cigarette use among 12th graders. (
Read more.)
One of the less-noticed elements of the new Every Student Succeeds Act is the authorization of hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars annually to support the increased growth of charter schools. Charter schools are educational providers, but they are also businesses. A large portion of them are run by private corporations, and receive taxpayer dollars to provide their services. Yet
there is very little public understanding of the often-convoluted ways these companies use those dollars and take advantage of laws in ways that enrich owners, officers, and investors. A new research brief by Bruce Baker and Gary Miron details some of the ways that individuals, companies, and organizations secure financial gain and generate profit by running charter schools, leading them to operate in ways that are sometimes at odds with the public interest. In The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies that Charter Operators Use for Financial Benefit, they explore the differences between charters and traditional public schools, and they illustrate how charter school policies sometimes function to promote profiteering and privatization of public assets.
A
new report found that despite the enormous sums school districts are spending on professional development, an average of almost $18,000 per teacher per year,
there is no evidence that any particular approach or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve in the classroom.
On the surface, these findings are disconcerting, but after digging into the research, we've found key learnings that school districts can take and apply to improve their teacher professional development programs. (
Read more.)
Some 90 years out from the Scopes Monkey Trial, and a full decade after the legal defeat of "intelligent design" in Kitzmiller v. Dover
, the fight to teach creationism alongside evolution in American public schools has yet to go extinct. On the contrary, a new analysis in the journal Science
suggests that such efforts have themselves evolved over time-adapting into a complex form of "stealth creationism" that's steadily tougher to detect.
Call it survival of the fittest policy.
"It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than 90 percent probability," Nick Matzke, a researcher at the Australian National University and author of the new paper, tells CityLab via email. "I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece-they are all 'stealth creationism,' and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations." (
Read more.)
I don't particularly despise charter schools. Honestly, I like any school that's a good school, whether it is public, private, or charter. There isn't anything about the public school format that precludes the creation of a good school, so I figure that the best path to follow is to create good public schools instead of creating new formats. I find them unnecessary. Tell us why charter schools are necessary. So let's have a space for this. Let's have a space for charter school proponents to make their case. But first, some provisos:
If you're going to claim that after there are charters, that choice and the invisible hand of the market will create better schools across the state, then please tell us which state has already benefited in this way by the presence of charter schools. If you're going to say that things will work this way then tell us where and when that has ever happened before. (Read more.)
Even before the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, Calif., security was a 2016 hot-button topic in the meetings and travel industry. In CWT's
fall 2015 survey of 1,016 travel managers, safety and security was by far the highest priority on their agenda for 2016, with 80 percent of respondents expecting it to have a high or very high impact on their travel programs.
In EventMB's "10 Event Trends for 2016 Report," security was also a key concern. The authors predict that organizations will look to technology to improve communication at events. (
Read more.)
Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes-few of which a 4-year-old can "decode," the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.
Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. (
Read more.)
Despite the overwhelming and research-based concerns regarding value-added models (VAMs), VAM advocates, policymakers, and supporters continue to hold strong to VAMs' purported, yet still largely theoretical strengths and potentials.
Those advancing VAMs have, more or less, adopted and promoted a set of agreed-upon, albeit "heroic" set of assumptions, without independent, peer-reviewed research in support. These "heroic" assumptions transcend promotional, policy, media, and research-based pieces, but they have never been fully investigated, explicated, or made explicit as a set or whole. These assumptions, though often violated, are often ignored in order to promote VAM adoption and use, and also to sell for-profits' and sometimes non-profits' VAM-based systems to states and districts. The purpose of this study was to make obvious the assumptions that have been made within the VAM narrative and that, accordingly, have often been accepted without challenge. (
Read more.)
The claim that public schools are hostile to Christians ... isn't true.
Truth be told, students of all faiths are actually free to pray alone or in groups during the school day, as long as they don't disrupt the school or interfere with the rights of others. Of course, the right to engage in voluntary prayer or religious discussion does not necessarily include the right to preach to a captive audience, like an assembly, or to compel other students to participate.
Visit public schools anywhere in America today and you're likely to see kids praying around the flagpole, sharing their faith with classmates, reading scriptures in free time, forming religious clubs, and in other ways bringing God with them through the schoolhouse door each day. (
Read more.)
Current U.S. educational policy, with its emphasis on high-stakes testing and scripted, "teacher-proof" curricula, have impeded creativity in teaching and learning. Based on the findings of this study, suggestions for curricula include the incorporation of teachers' unique personal creative interests in lessons, along with infusion of the arts and music across varied disciplinary content. Teacher education programs and professional development courses should include a focus on both real-world, cross-disciplinary lesson planning, while administrators and policymakers should support opportunities for teachers to take creative and/or intellectual risks in their work. (Read more.)
The steady growth of charter schools and public school choice programs is changing the ways that U.S. public schools are governed. Traditionally, states delegate school governance to school districts, with governing authority held by locally elected boards. These districts then assign students to neighborhood schools based on students' home addresses. Increasingly, however, school choice reforms are weakening the link between residential address and school assignment, encouraging families to choose from an assortment of tuition-free options. These reforms bring a type of market-based accountability that generates pressure for schools to appeal to local families. This has implications for the ways that schools serve private and public interests, raising important questions for state regulators. (Read more.)
Upcoming Event:The 94rd Annual Meeting of the Horace Mann League will be held on Friday, February, 12, 2016, at the Phoenix Downtown Sheraton Hotel, starting at 11:45 am. Registration information, click here.
Special awards will be presented to the following at the annual meeting.
Dr. Andy Hargreaves Outstanding Friend of Public Education. Professor and Author, Boston College
Dr. Gene Glass
Outstanding Public
Education. Professor and Author, National Education Policy Center
Gary Marx
Outstanding Friend of the League. Author and Past President of the HML, President of Public Outreach
Sponsor a Professional Colleague for membership in the Horace Mann League.
Click here to download the "Sponsor a Colleague" form.
Starting the week off with a cartoon.
A gift for your Community Leaders: On the Art of Teaching by Horace Mann.
The book,
On The Art of Teaching by Horace Mann has been presented to new teachers as a welcome gift by a number of schools district. For orders of 50 or more, the district's name is printed on the front cover.
Ordering Information
Cost per copy: $12.50
Orders of 50 to 99: $11.00
Orders of 100 or more: $10.00
Send orders to: (include name of district, P.O. #, and address)
In 1840 Mann wrote On the Art of Teaching. Some of HML members present On the Art of Teaching to new teachers as part of their orientation program. On the inside cover, some write a personal welcome message to the recipient. Other HML members present the book to school board members and parental organizations as a token of appreciation for becoming involved in their schools. The book cover can be designed with the organization's name. For more information, contact the HML (
Jack McKay)
The Horace Mann League of the USA is an honorary society that promotes the ideals of Horace Mann by advocating for public education as the cornerstone of our democracy.
Officers:
President: Dr.Charles Fowler, Exec. Director, Suburban School Administrators, Exeter, HN
President-elect: Dr. Christine Johns-Haines, Superintendent, Utica Community Schools, MI
Vice President: Dr. Martha Bruckner, Superintendent, Council Bluffs Community Schools, IA
1st Past President: Mr. Gary Marx, President for Public Outreach, Vienna, VA
2nd Past President: Dr. Joe Hairston, President, Vision Unlimited, Reisterstown, MD
Directors:
Dr. Laurie Barron, Supt. of Schools, Evergreen School District, Kalispell , MT
Dr. Evelyn Blose-Holman, (ret.) Superintendent, Bay Shore Schools, NY
Mr. Jeffery Charbonneau, Science Coordinator, ESD 105 and Zillah HS, WA
Dr. Carol Choye, Instructor, (ret.) Superintendent, Scotch Plains Schools, NJ
Dr. Brent Clark, Executive Director, Illinois Assoc. of School Admin. IL
Dr. Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education, Stanford U. CA
Dr. James Harvey, Exec. Dir., Superintendents Roundtable, WA
Dr. Eric King, Superintendent, (ret.) Muncie Public Schools, IN
Dr. Steven Ladd, Superintendent, (ret.) Elk Grove Unified School District, Elk Grove, CA
Dr. Barry Lynn, Exec. Dir., Americans United, Washington, DC
Dr. Kevin Maxwell, CEO, Prince George's County Schools, Upper Marlboro, MD
Dr. Stan Olson, President, Silverback Learning, (former supt. of Boise Schools, ID)
Dr. Steven Webb, Supt. of Schools, Vancouver School District, WA
Executive Director:
Dr. Jack McKay, Professor Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Omaha,
560 Rainier Lane, Port Ludlow, WA 98365 (360) 821 9877
To become a member of the HML, click here to download an application.