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Welcome to the HML POST
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(Editorials and research articles are selected by
Jack McKay, Executive director of the HML. Topics are selected to provoke a discussion about the importance of strong public schools.
McKay is Professor Emeritus from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in the Department of Educational Administration and a former superintendent in Washington state.) Feedback is always appreciated.
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Educational Leadership and Racism: A Narrative Inquiry into Second-Generation Segregation by Jeffrey Brooks, Noelle Witherspoon Arnold & Melanie C. Brooks on the Teachers College Record site  In-school racial segregation, also called second-generation segregation, is a social dynamic that is manifest in different and complicated ways in schoolhouses across the United States. This study sought to investigate how building-level leadership facilitates or impedes the practice of racial equity in an urban high school, from teachers' and administrators' perspectives.
The primary purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate how educational leaders perceive and influence second-generation in urban secondary schools. Conclusions/Recommendations: The study revealed that both formal and informal leadership influenced second-generation segregation in the school. The authors conclude with recommendations for improving future research focusing on the topic and with recommendations for improved practice.
Inequitable school funding called "one of the sleeper civil rights issues of our time" by Emma Brown on the Washington Post site  Funding for public education in most states is inadequate and inequitable, creating a huge obstacle for the nation's growing number of poor children as they try to overcome their circumstances, according to a set of reports released Monday by civil rights groups.
Students in the nation's highest-spending state (New York) receive about $12,000 more each year than students in the lowest-spending state (Idaho), according to the reports, and in most states school districts in wealthy areas spend as much or more per pupil than districts with high concentrations of poverty. In addition, many states were spending less on education in 2012 than they were in 2008, relative to their overall economic productivity, according to the reports.
The Dilemma of Fast, Cheap, and Good: You Can Only Pick Two by Larry Cuban on the Cuban site  Teachers, principals, researchers, and parents face dilemmas daily. For readers of this post, the most common they face is the tension between personal and professional values-spend time with family and friends vs. spend time at work. Because time is limited, you cannot do it all-choices have to be made. Compromises and tradeoffs are inevitable. From CEOs to software designers to single Moms to marketing consultants, these dilemmas are ever present.
For entrepreneurs, start-up innovators, policymakers, principals, and teachers who initiate projects there is a another dilemma that won't go away. The dilemma is choosing among three competing values: do the project fast, do it cheap, and do it "good."
Baltimore County Chief Details Need for Common Core Communications by Joetta Sack-Min on the Learning First Alliance site
 Many school districts are concerned that assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards will show lower test scores, and ultimately, a backlash against that standards. But Dr. Dallas Dance, the acclaimed superintendent of Baltimore County, Maryland, public schools, says much of the concern can be alleviated with proactive communications with parents and teachers so they can understand the benefit of CCSS.
"Let's be honest--scores will dip," Dance said in a podcast interview with the Learning First Alliance as part of its "Get It Right: Common Sense on the Common Core" campaign.
Communication is essential "not just to our parents in our community, to our teachers, to our principals, but also communicating to our students that what we're learning today is quite different from what we learned even three years ago," he added.
Evidence of Grade and Subject-Level Bias in Value-Added Measures by Jessica Holloway-Libell on the Teachers College Record site  While value-added models (VAMs)-the statistical tools used to measure teacher effects on student achievement scores-continue to emerge throughout districts and states across the country, education scholars simultaneously recommend caution, especially in terms of the inferences that are made and/or used based on VAM outcomes. This research note investigates an unexplored feature of bias in VAM-based estimates-that which is associated with grade levels and subject areas. Findings contribute an alternative perspective regarding how we think about VAM-based bias and teacher classifications.
Cyberbullying and face-to-face harassment a toxic combination for kids by
Keith Wagstaff on the Today site
 Not all bullying is equal, according to a new study, with the old-fashioned, real-life variety more damaging than the cyber kind. A combination of both, however, could be the real danger to kids.
Researchers from the University of New Hampshire analyzed interviews with 791 people (ages 10 to 20) who had taken part in a previous harassment survey. They looked at three types of bullying: face-to-face, technology only, and a mix of the two. Ordering the book, click here.
 Scott Walker touted changes he's made to K-12 education as governor in Wisconsin in a newspaper column published Wednesday, saying there's "no reason" what he's done in the state can't be matched nationwide.
"Now, more than ever, we need to push big, bold reforms to improve our schools," Walker wrote Wednesday in a column published by The Des Moines Register in Iowa. "If we can do it in Wisconsin, there is no reason we can't push positive education reforms across the country."
Walker's education policies have included expanding school choice efforts and cutting funding for public schools. His call to take such efforts nationwide elicited anger from his opponents in Wisconsin, who also vehemently opposed his efforts on union rights.
Myth: Blended Learning is the Next Ed Tech Revolution - Hype, Harm and Hope
by Philip McCrea on the McCrea site
 Blended learning, where students' face-to-face education is blended with Internet resources or online courses, has been gaining considerable attention in education reform circles. It has become entangled with the ambiguous notion of personalized learning and is being positioned as the new way to individualize learning in competency-based education systems.
Students blending the use of technology with face-to-face instruction as a means of collaborating and extending their learning experiences is not unusual, revolutionary or foreign to the average Canadian classroom. As a concept, blended learning is now almost two decades old, having been imported into K-12 education in the late 1990s from corporate education, business training firms and the post-secondary education sector. Although the precise origin is unclear, it has been suggested that an Atlanta-based computer training business coined the term in 1999 (Friesen 2012), as it announced the release of a new generation of online courses for adults that were to be blended with live instruction.
 In this essay, he recalls a story of a man who became the nation's leading vendor of "shoe buttons" a century ago. He cornered the market on shoe buttons. He knew everything there was to know about shoe buttons, and he became a very rich man. His great success persuaded him that he was an expert on everything. The essay then refers to the "reformers" who think that their fabulous wealth entitles them to opine on how to re-engineer schools. They don't listen to people who work in schools or people who are researchers and scholars of education, because those people are not fabulously wealthy; in the eyes of those who have cornered the market on shoe buttons or computers, the opinion of mere educators counts for nothing. Educators, in the eyes of "reformers," are the status quo because they are educators. Better to trust someone who has never taught or studied the subject in depth.
Glass suggests that Bill Gates and his wife Melinda may be prime examples of the Shoe Button Complex.
Saving the charter school movement from itself b
y Amy Dean on the Aljazeera site
Charter schools are being used as a front for union bashing and privatization, but it doesn't have to be that way. Advocates of charter schools argue that they are innovative laboratories of experimentation. But the reality is that over the past decade, the policies that led to the creation of these schools have been used to advance a political agenda: putting public resources into private hands, reducing accountability over how those resources are used and scapegoating teachers for the many problems that plague public education.
In doing so, many charter advocates have threatened to transform public education into a resource-scarce system that relies on philanthropy to function. That's a shame. If charters were reimagined to respect their original objectives - to allow educators to experiment with new ideas, advance teachers' voice in education and strengthen the public school system as a whole - they could yet live up to their potential.
The hard ethical challenges that confront teachers today
by Valerie Strauss on the Washington Post site
The teaching profession isn't what it used to be. For years now, teachers in public schools have become the target of savage criticism - much of it not warranted - and have seen their autonomy reduced or eliminated, their expertise dismissed, and their opinions ignored. They are underpaid even while they are being blamed for things that aren't their fault and being evaluated by invalid measurement tools.
With all of that, today's teachers - prospective, new and veteran - also face growing ethical challenges, which was the subject of a recent
commencement speech given to graduates of Bank Street Graduate School of Education in New York by scholar
Richard Rothstein
, who received an honor doctorate for his contribution to the field of education.
 Bank Street graduates: I'm flattered to be sharing this occasion with you. With courage, you have chosen to enter or advance in the nation's most critical profession, at a time when selfish and misguided elites have made public education, and its teachers, scapegoats for the unacceptable racial and economic inequality that those elites have permitted, indeed encouraged, to persist and grow in America.
It has often been said, by self-styled education reformers, that teaching in impoverished, segregated, communities is the "civil rights" cause of our time. That notion suggests breathtaking disrespect for the sacrifices of those who fought, and continue to fight, for adequate housing, good health care, quality early childhood and community programs, full employment at living wages, and racial integration. Yet our national education policy insists that we can ignore those unsolved problems and assure children's success simply by recruiting better teachers who have higher expectations for their students.
I've Changed My Mind About Home and Private Schoolers Playing Public School Sports by Bob Cook on the Forbes site
 Now, I have been harsh in the past regarding so-called Tim Tebow bills - named after the most famous home-schooled, public-school playing athlete ever - to allow home-schoolers to play on public school teams. Very harsh. As a public school parent, I felt like home-schoolers had essentially set up their own private school, even if it were a private school of one, and had done so as a rejection of the local public school. So why let them play because the family realized there wasn't much school spirit coming from learning at the kitchen table? As far the we-paid-our-taxes argument, I've noted that I also pay taxes to support the armed forces, yet no one is passing a law allowing me access to drive a tank.
Then, in the last few years, the Tebow idea has been extended toallowing any private-school athletes to play at a public school. Bills allowing this have failed in Kentucky, New Mexico and South Carolina, but one did pass in Ohio in 2013. And now, we have Wisconsin considering the idea.
The awful effects of the Regents proposed APPR regulations: What every teacher and parent should know by Carol Burris on the Round the Inkwell site
 On Monday, the New York State Board of Regents will meet to vote on the NYSED recommendations for changes to APPR.
If APPR was bad before (and it was) it is about to get considerably worse. Here is why: Half of a teacher's evaluation will be dependent on the performance of her students. For 3-8 teachers of Common Core English and/or mathematics, that rating (Ineffective, Developing, Effective of High Effective) will be either 100% dependent on Common Core tests, or 80% dependent on Common Core tests.
 School leaders know that the journey to equity can involve turmoil and controversy. This illuminating book demonstrates how in the most effective schools here and worldwide, equity is the most powerful means we have to lift all children to higher achievement. The authors challenge the "zero sum" myth head-on, arguing that equity is truly the path to excellence - for low AND high-achieving students, and our educational system overall.
In this ground-breaking anthology, renowned authors Noguera and Blankstein pair leading-edge ideas from award-winning educational scholars, visionaries, and practitioners with powerful case studies from multicultural K-12 settings at all levels of the system who have pursued equity goals and closed instructional and achievement gaps.
Powerful Forces Behind Rampant Intellectual Dishonesty by Paul Krugman on the AlterNet site  In his quest for the perfect metaphor for the deep intellectual honesty about economics that he frequently bemoans, Paul Krugman borrows a term from "South Park" in Monday's column. The word is "derp." At first, it looks like a typo when he writes, "we live in an age of derp and cheap cynicism." "Derp," for the uninitiated, comes from the show "South Park" and for Krugman it provides a little shorthand term for an "all-too-obvious feature of the modern intellectual landscape: people who keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it's completely wrong." The deepest and most frustrating example of "derp" is ongoing fear mongering about inflation, in Krugman's view. It's perfectly okay to be wrong about something at first-everyone makes mistakes-it's the insistence on the disproven hypothesis that is so, well, derp. What's behind this intellectual dishonesty?
 Studies confirm that nearly 50 percent of all teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching. Just think about that: Half of those that answered the call with me will have called it quits by the end of next year. The average teacher's career more so resembles the latest installment of The Hunger Games than a profession. Sadly, the field of education doesn't look to be headed for a Hollywood ending.
Take a look at the numbers: Over the last 15 years, the amount of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches has increased by 12 percent. When analyzing standardized test scores, 30 countries separate the U.S. and the top five. Given the latest statistics coming out of the classroom, it comes as no surprise that teachers are looking for a way out.
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.
 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.
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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. 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.
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So what has been Natomas' experience with TFA. TFA spends millions marketing and can reliably produce a corp member or two to talk about their amazing experience in the classroom. So I thought I would ask teachers in the schools that have worked with TFA Special Education teachers for counter-narrative- I conducted some investigative blogging. I have included below a summary of the comments that came from teachers at Inderkum High School and other schools in Natomas where Teach For America Special Education teachers have been placed. They should provide some important areas for inquiry for the Natomas School Board.
