Welcome to the April 4, 2016, edition of the HML Post.  A service to the members of the Horace Mann League of the USA.   (Editorials and research articles are selected by  Jack McKay , Executive director of the HML.Topics are selected to provoke discussions about the importance of strong public schools.  Feedback is always appreciated.)
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Past issues of the HML Post, click here.
I haven't walked more than 10 steps into Brandywine High School in North Wilmington when I spot four pamphlets on bullying. There's one on cyberbullying and how it's "seriously wrong." Another instructs teachers on how to create a "bullying-free school." A third guide, titled "10 Tips to Help Stop Bullying," urges adults to "Set the example! Treat everyone - including your child - with respect."
So it's a little odd when, less than a half-hour later. I'm in Kenny Rivera's advanced placement government class watching Donald Trump give his infamous  "blood coming out of her wherever"  account. And given the content of those prominently placed pamphlets, it's also a little odd to hear the response from 10 high school seniors watching the video:  laughter.  ( Read more.)

A recent poll of nearly a million U.S. students concludes that  schools need to work on building supports to keep students invested in their educations, especially as they advance in grade.
The survey, conducted by Gallup, found that only half of adolescents report feeling engaged in school, and a fifth are actively disengaged. About 10 percent of students are classified as both disengaged and discouraged.
Engagement levels also show a consistent decrease as students get older, bottoming out in 11th grade.
The Gallup Student Poll asked the participants two dozen questions about their level of success in school, then categorized the answers into four areas: engagement, hope, entrepreneurial skills, and financial literacy.  ( Read more.)

The Four Biggest Factors In Teacher Turnover    by Matthew Lynch on the the Edvocate site.
Teacher turnover is a major problem in education that affects student, teachers, and administrators alike. But what's behind the massive migration and exodus of new teachers? And what's to be done about it? Researchers have identified four major factors that should be addressed to reduce teacher turnover and to retain them for a longer duration in the profession.
1. Compensation
2. Working Conditions
3. Teacher Education
4. Mentoring   (Read more.)
























Start-up charter schools are public only regarding tax revenue but!  by William Phillis  on the Ohio E and A site.
Start-up charter schools are public only regarding tax revenue but are private with respect to purpose, motivation, mission, expenditures and operations
The state takes local and state tax funds from public school districts to fund a privately-operated, parallel charter school industry. The state policy that permits this charter business enterprise is irrational. Would it be efficacious for the state to extract funds from city, village, township and county governments to establish private, parallel governing bodies to provide competing services? The local government officials would not tolerate that arrangement. Neither should local school officials.   ( Read more. )

Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking: Do Choice Policies Segregate Schools?  by William Mathis and Kevin Wilner on the National Education Policy Center site. 
From the outset, school choice advocates have contended that choice policies would advance integration.  Choice can give children the opportunity to attend a school outside of highly segregated neighborhoods, with the hope that market forces will drive integration. Buttressing the integration claims, these advocates assert that charter schools, the most common and most extensively studied form of school choice, enroll a greater proportion of students from low-income families and students of color than do traditional public schools. Yet the weight of the research evidence does not support such claims, and a key flaw in the arguments concerns the level of aggregation. By aggregating charter school enrollments from highly segregated white schools and from highly segregated Black or Hispanic schools, an advocate can show overall charter enrollments that contain a nice mix of students. Aggregating enrollments across schools washes out school-level segregation.  (Read more.)

Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding for Private Schools  on the Southern Education Foundation site.
Currently, 19 states across America have statewide programs that provide public funding to support children's attendance in private schools. These state programs are located in each region of the nation, but they are concentrated in the South. Nine Southern states have enacted legislation that directly or indirectly funds private schools.  
This phenomenon is occurring more than 60 years after the United States Supreme Court issued their ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring racial segregation in the nation's public schools "inherently unequal" and a violation of the US Constitution. Brown, in tandem with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965, abolished the legalized separation of white and black students, and prevented taxpayer dollars from going to de jure segregated public schools.   ( Read more.)

Common Core's major political challenges for the remainder of 2016  by Tom Loveless on the Brown Center Chalkboard site.
The BCR study produced two major findings.  First, several changes that CCSS promotes in curriculum and instruction appear to be taking place at the school level.  Second, states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.  These are merely associations and cannot be interpreted as saying anything about CCSS's causal impact.  Politically, that doesn't really matter. The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.  Yes, it's unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.  No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic.

Across the country, as public school systems in major cities follow a trend towards privatization that has left the city of New Orleans without a single public school, community outcry over disappearing resources and unrelenting standardized testing mandates has increasingly hit the news.
Meanwhile, in Seattle, a growing grassroots movement led by teachers and students has driven a boycott movement against what local teacher Jesse Hagopian  deems the "testocracy."
But nowhere has the battle for the soul of education come to a head as it has in Chicago.  ( Read More.)

Effects of School Choice: Holland, Michigan on the Education Under Attack site.
Superintendent of Holland Public Schools Brian Davis points directly at school choice as the reason why the district's population doesn't reflect the community it serves. Davis recalls 1996 (when Michigan's Schools of Choice law went into effect) as a time when Holland parents began to look at neighboring Zeeland schools as a choice. Zeeland was 94% White (2000 census).   Also, providing school choice was an invitation to start charter schools.  Today, 17% of students attending school in Holland go to charter schools.
Davis said some families chose to attend other schools when they noticed an "increasing free and reduced lunch" student population.  He stated that "middle to upper-middle class families with disposable income" were the ones with enough time and money to drive their kids to neighboring Zeeland or charter schools.  ( Read more.)
 
After careful thought and deliberation, the Network for Public Education is calling for a national Opt Out because of the harmful effects of annual high-stakes testing on children and schools.  We enthusiastically support those parents who refuse to have their children take the 2016 state exams.
The alleged purpose of annual testing, federally mandated since NCLB was passed in 2004, is to unveil the achievement gaps within schools, ostensibly to close them.  Twelve years later, there is no conclusive evidence that NCLB high-stakes testing has improved the academic performance of any student-particularly those who need the most help. All that has been closed by testing are children's neighborhood schools.
 The current demand for high-stakes testing and uniform standards diverts attention from the hard work of school improvement and the correction of the social and economic inequities that lead to inequitable results.  (Read more. )
 
Where Are All the Kidcasts?   by Stephanie Hayes on the Atlantic Monthly site.
"The guilt of a parent who puts the television on to pacify their children is one of the most powerful emotional forces in existence," lamented Gimlet's Matt Lieber in a recent panel on podcasting . An audience member had just asked if the industry was planning on "growing the audience younger"-did the panelists (all audio specialists) think kids would even engage with podcasts? "A podcast aimed at 3-10-year-olds that parents could actually tolerate-if you could do it right-would be an unbelievable hit," Lieber replied. 
Apple may have  discontinued the device  that gave the podcast its name, but the medium has exploded in recent years. In 2014, Sarah Koenig's Serial  reached 5 million downloads or streams  faster than any podcast before it. That same year, NPR saw a 75 percent increase in podcast downloads, and three new podcasting networks were born. A 
recent report by Edison Research noted that the number of Americans listening to at least one podcast each month has grown almost 25 percent since 2015.  ( Read more.)
 

Don't Grade Schools on Grit by Angela Duckworth on the New York Times site. 
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once  observed , "Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education."
Evidence has now accumulated in support of King's proposition: Attributes like self-control predict children's success in school and beyond. Over the past few years, I've seen a groundswell of popular interest in character development.
As a social scientist researching the importance of character, I was heartened. It seemed that the narrow focus on standardized achievement test scores from the years I taught in public schools was giving way to a broader, more enlightened perspective.  ( Read more.)

Among educators on my social media feeds, many were all atwitter about "grit" guru Angela Duckworth penning  Don't Grade Schools on Grit  in the New York Times Sunday Review.
However, I must warn: Don't believe it.
Duckworth's apparent backpedaling on how most people embracing "grit" in education are applying her research-notably a new move to test for "grit"-has two fundamental problems.
First, please note that Duckworth's Op-Ed in the NYT conveniently coincides with yet another book of hers on, you guessed it, "grit."
Excuse my skepticism, but this Op-Ed is also PR for her incredibly lucrative career as a "grit" guru.
Second, and far more importantly, Duckworth's concession that "grit" is being misapplied (her version) falls well short of acknowledging that her "grit" research itself is both steeped in and perpetuating racism and classism .  ( Read more.)


Why Finland has the best schools  by William Doyle on the Los Angeles Times site.
The Harvard education professor Howard Gardner once advised Americans, "Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States."
  OK, I wasn't just blindly following Gardner - I had a position as a lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland for a semester. But the point is that, for five months, my wife, my son and I experienced a stunningly stress-free, and stunningly good, school system. Finland has a history of producing the highest global test scores in the Western world, as well as a trophy case full of other recent No. 1 global rankings, including most literate nation.
In Finland, children don't receive formal academic training until the age of 7. Until then, many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation. Most children walk or bike to school, even the youngest. School hours are short and homework is generally light.  ( Read more.)

Oakland District at Heart of Drive to Transform Urban Schools by Motoko Rich on the New York Times site. 
The 70 teachers who showed up to a school board meeting here recently in matching green and black T-shirts paraded in a circle, chanting, "Charter schools are not public schools!" and accusing the superintendent of doing the bidding of "a corporate oligarchy."
The superintendent, Antwan Wilson, who is an imposing 6-foot-4, favors crisp suits and Kangol caps and peers intensely through wire-rimmed glasses, has become accustomed to confrontation since he arrived in this activist community from Denver two years ago. One board meeting last fall reached such a fever pitch that police officers moved in to control the crowd.
Mr. Wilson is facing a rebellion by teachers and some parents against his plan to allow families to use a single form to apply to any of the city's 86 district-run schools or 44 charter campuses, all of which are competing for a shrinking number of students.  ( Read more.)
Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Amazon. These top tech companies each receive over a quadrillion resumes per year (source needed). So it's safe to say they have a good process for choosing the best job candidates. But what is it?
No, it's not that list of popular Google interview questions you Googled on Google. In fact, their finely tuned hiring process goes way beyond rudimentary queries on algorithms and quantum physics.
If you, too, want to hire the world's best top tech talent, try one of these secret hiring strategies.  ( Read more.)

Books by top educators that are connected to the Horace Mann League.

 

The Better Interview Questions and Possible Responses  (From the HML Post, published on March 21, 2016.)
 
Sponsor a Professional Colleague for membership in the Horace Mann League.       Click here to download the "Sponsor a Colleague" form.

Past issues of the HML Post, click here.  From 2012 to the present.
 
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)
The Horace Mann League of the USA
560 Rainier Lane
Port Ludlow, WA 98365
or   email:  Jack McKay
FAX (866) 389 0740
 
   
     The Horace Mann League  on the The Horace Mann League web site

"School Performance in Context:  The Iceberg Effect"   by James Harvey, Gary Marx, Charles Fowler and Jack McKay.
To download the full or summary report,
Summary Report, Click here 
Full Report,  click here 
To view in an electronic magazine format,
Summary Report, click here.
Full Report, click here 

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A Few Political Cartoons for the Week  
 



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Horace Mann Prints
 The 11 * 18 inch print is available for individual or bulk purchase.  Individual prints are $4.00.  Discount with orders of 50 or more.  
For additional information about this or other prints, please check here .
 
    
  
 
A Gift:   On the Art of Teaching   by Horace Mann
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)
 
  
  
  
 
   
    


All the past issues of the HML Posts are available for review and search purposes.
 
Finally, 7 links that may be of interest to you.
Jack's Fishing Expedition in British Columbia - short video


 
The Horace Mann League of the USA Post
About Us
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. Christine  Johns-Haines, Superintendent, Utica Community Schools, MI
President-elect: Dr. Martha Bruckner, Superintendent, Council Bluffs Community Schools, IA
Vice President: Dr. Eric King, Superintendent, (ret.) Muncie Public Schools, IN
Past President: Dr. Charles Fowler, Exec. Director, Suburban School Administrators, Exeter, HN

Directors:
Dr. Ruben Alejandro, Supt. of Schools, Weslaco, TX
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. Ember Conley, Supt. of Schools, Park City, UT
Dr. Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education, Stanford U. CA
Dr. James Harvey, Exec. Dir., Superintendents Roundtable, WA
Dr. Steven Ladd, Superintendent, (ret.) Elk Grove Unified School District, Elk Grove, CA 
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.