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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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We all hope you have a great summer too! And a Happy Fourth of July.
 Public-school teachers in the United States seem to be in a perennial tug-of-war with the government, from grievances over their pay to pleas for freedom fromteaching to the test. Sometimes, they just want a little more respect from the people they serve. In a Harris poll of American adults last year, roughly 80 percent of respondents reported that back in their own school days, students had respected their teachers. Only about 30 percent believed the same was true of students today. "Controversy, suspicion, and accusations plague education, from the kindergarten classroom to federal-level policies," The Atlantic reported in response to the poll results.
In an effort to voice their frustration, conquer injustice, or show how integral they are to the social fabric, teachers often resort to protest. Just last month, more than 2,000 teachers in Seattle staged the latest in a series of one-day walkouts over education funding. In 2012, after contract negotiations broke down, Chicago's teachers union held a strike that kept the city's 350,000 students out of class for a week and a half.
 Findings:
In terms of classroom instruction, we found that ICT had affected school, teacher, and student practices in some ways, but traditional teacher-centered practices such as student completion of printed worksheets were still prevalent. However, widespread student access to personal media devices and online social media site influence had a noticeable effect on the two high schools. The researchers encountered specific "types" of students whom technology particularly influenced: "Digital Rebels," "Cyber Wanderers," and "eLearning Pioneers." In addition, we discovered that computer-based remedial programs served as problematic educational lifelines for students at risk of dropping out.
Conclusions:
The two study high schools presented a complex portrait. In the end, technology functioned both as an imperfect school reform effort that produced only partial instructional change and as a successful though uninvited disruptive innovation that allowed students to challenge and unsettle existing educational norms. We close by considering implications of our findings.
 Top 100 Inspirational Quotes By Kevin Kruse Inspirational quotes and motivational quotes have the power to get us through a bad week, and can even give us the courage to pursue our life's dreams. In my book, 4 Keys to Happiness and Fulfillment at Work, I share surprising research into the true triggers of workplace motivation. So in the spirit of self motivation, here are 100 inspirational quotes.
1. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. -Napoleon Hill
2. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. -Steve Jobs
 Making public education more accountable has been the solemn pledge of government officials for years, including the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Yet that same level of accountability doesn't seem to apply to the fastest growing sector of K-12 education - charter schools.
That has to stop, says a coalition of labor, community, and public education advocacy organizations. The coalition, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, has written a letter to Secretary Duncan raising concerns about his department's continued funding of charter schools - $1.7 billion in grants since 2009, according to an article in The Washington Post - while providing little to no oversight over what schools did with the money.
Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning reviewed by Arlo Kempf  As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) make their way into nearly all realms of classroom teaching and learning in districts and schools across the country, Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning offers a research-rich guide to performance assessments and makes the case for their inclusion at the center of 21st century assessment in place of multiple choice testing. Linda Darling-Hammond, her co-editor Frank Adamson, and their contributors have assembled the most powerful, detailed, and comprehensive academic case against multiple-choice testing to date-based on deep and wide research from top scholars, much of it conducted by the contributors.
Laying bare the timing, policy, and political implications of the work, Darling-Hammond, Adamson & Toch argue: "The advent of the Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the emergence of new accountability systems under federally approved waivers from [No Child Left Behind] provide a potential opportunity to address [the] fundamental misalignment between our aspirations for students and the assessments we use to measure whether they are achieving these goals. Performance assessments are the means and 21st century learning and skills are the ends.
 Since the early 1980s, education platforms have been essential to political campaigns for governorships and the presidency, with education policy increasingly defining elected officials' political legacies. With the passing of No Child Left Behind in 2001, education legislation shifted even further to national prominence, as NCLB came to represent the "power" of bi-partisan commitments to education reform.
Yet in addressing education issues candidates are likely to remain trapped inside the failed accountability mindset for reforming schools - one that privileges "standards" and "tests" as the central means of closing the infamous achievement gap. But there are better ways to approach what plagues us. Instead of focusing merely on "accountability," presidential candidates should be challenged first to confront and then address the tremendous social and educational inequities that plague our public schools.
Teacher greets new superintendent with epic anti-testing rant by Andy Goldstein
But at Superintendent Robert Avossa's first school board meeting Wednesday, Goldstein eschewed melody for a full-on, spoken-word rant about the school system's reliance on standardized testing.
Calling Avossa's arrival "a new beginning," the Omni Middle teacher lamented that the last school year was "a year of seemingly endless standardized testing, and diagnostic testing for standardized testing."
"Our school district has seemingly adopted a curriculum whose motto is 'Testing is teaching'," he said.
Bill Gates: Common Core Spending- An Update by Mercedes Schneider on the Deutsch29 site
 Between August 27, 2013, and October 05, 2013, I wrote a six-part series on Bill Gates' funding of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
I noted in my October 05, 2013, post, that the total CCSS funding as reported on the Gates Foundation's "awarded grants" search engine was $173.5 million. (I now know I missed a few between the time I started my investigation at the end of August and concluded the series at the beginning of October.)
The search term I used in my search was "common core," with the exception of one grant to the Fordham Institute, which was under the search term, "common standards." (I had to determine at what point in Gates' CCSS funding chronology my 2013 search left off, and it was with this August 2013 grant to MIT. So, I apparently missed some grants that were posted during the end-of-August, beginning-of-October span in writing my 2013 series, but these are now accounted for.)
Thus, based upon the $173.5 million I documented in 2013 and the $49.5 million documented today, it seems that Gates has spent at least $223 million on CCSS to date.
 In grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. The average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading. The average differences were all statistically significant. Adjusting the comparisons for student characteristics resulted in reductions in all four average differences of approximately 11 to 14 points. Based on adjusted school means, the average for public schools was significantly higher than the average for private schools for grade 4 mathematics, while the average for private schools was significantly higher than the average for public schools for grade 8 reading. The average differences in adjusted school means for both grade 4 reading and grade 8 mathematics were not significantly different from zero.
 New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's ambitious plan to expand public pre-kindergarten for all 4 year-olds depends in part on the participation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim schools, under a proposal that would permit religious instruction and prayers during midday breaks.
But civil liberties groups are already objecting to the plan, which would take effect next fall, saying allowing a prayer break in a publicly funded classroom may violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
"It's kind of like waving a red flag in front of a bull," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "This seems to be asking for a lawsuit.
Scott Walker's Unprecedented Voucher Expansion by Jonas Persson and Mary Bottari on the Truthout site
 At a time when other states are reinvesting in public education, Wisconsin continues to slash and burn. The Wisconsin Budget Project says that the state is now spending $1,014 less per public school student than it did in 2008 and more funds are slated to be siphoned off as Governor Scott Walker's budget proposes an unprecedented voucher expansion, draining funds from public education and directing them to for-profit and religious schools.
In crafting the budget, Walker is taking his cues from the American Federation for Children (AFC), a major force for school privatization nationwide. It is funded and chaired by billionaire Betsy DeVos, and pushes its privatization agenda in the states with high-dollar lobbying and attack ads.
An education agenda for 2016: Conservative solutions for expanding opportunity by Edited by Frederick M. Hess and Max Eden on the American Enterprise Institute 
Key Points
- *America's pre-K, K-12, and higher education systems are in need of reform, but the Obama administration's reform implementation efforts have been marked by an unprecedented expansion of federal authority and a remarkable faith in the ability of federal bureaucrats.
- * Although conservative presidential candidates might be tempted to double down on rhetoric about abolishing the federal role in education, conservatives should instead offer a reform agenda that clarifies how to tap into the strengths of the federal system to foster educational opportunity for all.
- Specifically, these candidates should strive to expand educational options and access, increase transparency regarding school quality and student outcomes, make long-term investments in research and development, and eliminate burdensome regulations.
 Back in 2013, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that MOOCs-massive open online courses-were about to change everything:
Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty-by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education ...
MOOCs have since lost their hype, undergoing flameouts and suffering from poor participation and competency rates. A University of Pennsylvania study of 1 million MOOC users who participated in 16 of the school's Coursera classes, for example, found that only about half of the registrants viewed even a single online lecture and that the average completion rate was just 4 percent.
 Americans are about as likely to rate the quality of education that community colleges offer as "excellent" or "good" (66%) as they are to rate four-year colleges this positively (70%). Americans are about half as likely to rate the quality of Internet-based college programs -- those offering online-only courses -- as excellent or good (36%).
Story Highlights
- Seven in 10 say quality of four-year college education is excellent or good
- Nearly as many rate community college education as excellent or good
- About one in three say quality of online college education is excellent or good
 Quinn Mulholland of the Harvard Political Review examined the issues surrounding annual mandated testing, interviewed leading figures on both sides, and concluded that the exams are overkill. They cost too much, they narrow the curriculum, they take too many hours, they distort the purpose of education.
Mulholland concludes:
Given all of these problems with standardized testing, it seems that the civil rights issue is too much testing, not too little. Instead of forcing low-income schools to spend millions of dollars and countless hours of class time preparing for and administering standardized tests that only serve to prove, oftentimes inaccurately, what we already know about the achievement gap, we should use those resources to expand programs in the arts and humanities, to provide incentive pay to attract teachers to areas where they are needed most, and to decrease class sizes, all things that could actually make a difference for disadvantaged students.
In Corporatization They Trust by Dave Greene on the Education Bloggers Network
 How many of us get the big picture about what is happening to American Education?
How many of us have seen the grand scheme? Scholars have followed the attempts to privatize education, one of the biggest industries in America, for 100 years. John Bellamy Foster wrote a paper in Monthly Review (referenced below) about that. But up until now these attempts were not successful.
What is different now is that this movement has become successful and it will take everything we have to hold it off. We must fight with every ounce of strength and try to capitalize on our numbers, not just in voicing our concerns on social media but also by financially supporting efforts to fight their media machine by supporting pro public education documentaries so they can be screened at well known film festivals.
Next Time Someone Mocks Teachers For Making Less Money, Show Them This. Illustrations by Gavin Aung Than, words by Taylor Mali on the Zenpencil site
 
       
The Horace Mann League on the The Horace Mann league site
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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The key to a relaxing summer vacation is taking the time to leave your work life in order. The ultimate goal is to have systems in place so business continues smoothly in your absence, your vacation won't be interrupted unnecessarily, and you can return from your trip and back to the office without skipping a beat. Follow these 5 business etiquette tips to assist your colleagues and clients while you are away. 
