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Welcome to the HML POST
(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.
The HML website, Click
here.
The HML Flipboard magazine, Click
here to read and follow more articles.
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The HML Horace Mann Quotes on Pinterest, Click
here.
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A little humor to start off the new school year.
 In America, education was long seen as the great equalizer, but that has become mostly myth. So, over the past decade, there has been a vigorous effort to fortify and rebuild our schools, and in this there is a recognition that we have failed our children, especially those living in poverty, those for whom education could - and should - be transformational. From Chicago to New Orleans, school reform has been engineered by the well heeled and well connected - from hedge fund managers to corporate heads to directors of foundations - who believe that with the right kind of teachers and pedagogy, and with a business-like administration, schooling can trump the daily burdens and indignities of growing up poor. "No excuses" has become the rallying cry of the reformers.
Along comes Dale Russakoff's "The Prize," a brilliantly reported behind-the-scenes account of one city's attempt to right its failing public schools. (
Read more.)
Living an amazing and successful life will mean something different for each of us.
 There is one common theme that many of us would love to have in our life, and it can best be described in one word: Freedom.
We long to live life on our terms and wake up each day doing the things that are important to the kind of life we want to live.
For 12 years, I delivered bread in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was 170 pounds overweight, and our family was $180,000 in debt. I could never dream of a successful life because my self-limiting beliefs convinced me my life would never be more than what it was. I was stuck and woke up every day hating life. (
Read more.)
 In New York state this past spring, some 20 percent of students refused to take the 2015 state-mandated Common Core standardized tests in math and English language arts, highlighting the growth of a high-stakes testing "opt out" movement around the country. That amounts to more than 200,000 students from grades 3 through 8, with some districts reporting more opt-outs than students sitting for the test.
Last April, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch warned that school districts could lose funding - either by the federal government or the state - if enough students did not take the tests, and last week, state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia left open the possibility of sanctions. (
Read more.)
School districts will not be penalized for having large numbers of students refuse to sit for the New York State standardized tests this year, education officials said on Thursday, ending months of uncertainty over how they would respond to a growing antitesting movement.
For months, state and federal officials warned that districts that fell below a 95 percent participation rate might lose federal funds, while the leaders of the so-called opt-out movement have dismissed these as empty threats.
More than 200,000
third through eighth graders declined to take the exams this year. In a number of districts, students who refused to take the tests outnumbered those who did. (
Read more.)
Several states, including Arizona and Kansas, still have hundreds of open teaching positions with the start of the school year looming.
- As bad as things look in some parts of the country, they aren't likely to improve any time soon as enrollment in teacher training programs continues to drop.
- The crisis has forced districts to examine the root causes behind their shortages, which typically include low pay, a lack of tenure protection, and highly polarized education politics. (Read more.)
 International tests have purported to prove that America's schools are inefficient or run by lazy incompetents. Paper-and-pencil tests seemingly show that kids in private schools - funded by parents - are smarter than kids in public schools. We'll get to the top, so the story goes, if we test a teacher's students in September and June and fire that teacher if the gains aren't great enough.
There has been resistance, of course. Teachers and many parents understand that children's development is far too complex to capture with an hour or two taking a standardized test. So resistance has been met with legislated mandates. The test company lobbyists convince politicians that grading teachers and schools is as easy as grading cuts of meat. A huge publishing company from the UK has spent $8 million in the past decade lobbying Congress. Politicians believe that testing must be the cornerstone of any education policy. (
Read more.)
 Teacher bashing is at an all time high, with politicians on the left and right in a relentless race to find new ways to blame teachers for every American ill.
Are there bad teachers?
Absolutely.
But to attribute poor student achievement to teachers and teachers alone is akin to blaming dentists for cavities. Kids come to the dentist with unique sets of teeth and unique ways of cleaning them. Some kids don't clean them at all. I don't hear anyone blaming the dentists, but if we want to be consistent we should. (
Read more.)
Paul Horton: Public Education Nears a "Tipping Point
"
on the Ravitch blog
 News that teacher shortages exist in many states is not surprising to the nation's educators.
Many, if not most, teachers in the United States today do not feel as though they are respected. Public school teachers feel as though their profession is under assault in a country that seems to be abandoning the idea of public education.
Those who seek to defund public education and replace it with a corporate model that makes use of market mechanisms to serve "strivers" and their families sound very well intended. (
Read more.)
 It's no secret that a lot of professional development given to teachers is worthless. Teachers themselves have complained about it for years. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has repeatedly declared that PD is largely a waste of billions of dollars a year. A 2013 report by the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education noted that most teachers aren't given the kind of professional development that would actually help them, and it called the most prevalent model of PD nothing short of "abysmal." And early this month a study of 10,000 teachers by the nonprofit TNTP said that teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year is largely a waste (although some critics took issue with the methodology of the study). (Read more.)
 The 2015 recipient of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) National Teacher of the Year Award, Shanna Peeples, recently spoke aboutthe importance of teachers believing in their students-and imparting their expectations to students-particularly students who doubt their ability to succeed academically. Students have similar feelings and frequently report favoring teachers who "believe in [students'] ability to succeed". Teachers' expectations may either counteract or reinforce negative expectations held by traditionally disadvantaged students who lack access to educationally-successful role models. To date, however, little is known about how teachers form expectations and whether their expectations are systematically biased. (Read more.)
 There are few household names in education research. Maybe that in itself constitutes a problem. But if there was an Education Researcher Hall Of Fame, one member would be a silver-haired, plainspoken Kiwi named John Hattie.
2. Achievement tests.
3. School choice.
4. Class size.
 There has been rapid growth in value-added assessment of teachers to meet the widely supported policy goal of identifying the most effective and the most ineffective teachers in a school system. The former group is to be rewarded while the latter group is to be helped or fired for their poor performance. But, value-added approaches to teacher evaluation have many problems. Chief among them is the commonly found class-to-class and year-to-year unreliability in the scores obtained. Teacher value-added scores appear to be highly unstable across two classes of the same subject that they teach in the same semester, or from class to class across two adjacent years.
I conclude that because of the effects of countless exogenous variables on student classroom achievement, value-added assessments do not now and may never be stable enough from class to class or year to year to be used in evaluating teachers. The hope is that with three or more years of value-added data, the identification of extremely good and bad teachers might be possible; but, that goal is not assured, and empirical results suggest that it really is quite hard to reliably identify extremely good and extremely bad groups of teachers. (Read more.)
 When it comes to making decisions about what to buy, people go with their hearts more often then their heads. 31% of advertisers report gains from emotional campaigns, while only 16% report gains from campaigns that appeal to people's rational side.
These two infographics by
Blue and
Business 2 Community deal with the emotional appeal of ad copy and the emotional appeal of B2B advertising.
It turns out that there are lot of different ways to appeal to people's emotions. You can appeal to their fear of missing out. You can appeal to their desire to do good. You can appeal to their desire to be envied by others.
Louis Wilder addresses the gap between how we need to lead and how we actually perform our leadership responsibilities, and suggests that the "life" of a school should embody what and how we lead and provide the essential hope in our schools.
Wilder explains why a university educational administration program should be a loyal critic of the public schools. A certain detachment from the profession is essential, as too close a relationship fosters a kind of "groupthink" mentality that is not conducive to independent thought.
A university educational administration program should "educate" candidates, as opposed to their narrow "training." Instrumentalist-type training programs trying to produce technically equipped practitioners who know the rules and when and where and how to apply them without an understanding of the philosophical, historical and theoretical context are bound to fail, particularly in diverse settings where administrators need to see things from the point of view of others. Louis is professor at CSU Bakersfield and a former superintendent from Washington.
(
To order
.)
 The narrative's basic is Wanting To Have It Both Ways, and that principle is applied in several places. About Teachers:
The theory here is that teachers are awesome and wonderful and the most important people in education. The teachers union, however, is the single biggest obstacle to public education in this country. Great teachers should be paid a ton, and we'll be able to afford that because we will fire all of the terrible teachers in schools, because that's an easy call to make, and great teachers can teach as many students as you like? Also lots of teachers are terrible lazy slackers, and that's what the union is for. But teachers are great. Except for the many, many, many, many terrible ones. (Read more.)
A gift for your New Teachers: 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
FAX (866) 389 0740
To
download the full or summary report,
To
view in an electronic magazine format,
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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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Many classrooms will remain without a permanent teacher this fall, as the teacher shortage becomes more severe in some states. Major enrollment drops in teacher prep programs signal worsening conditions in the coming years.
The battle with charter school expansions is further revving up in Los Angeles, as a group of private foundations explore plans to expand the number of charter schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Los Angeles teachers union, UTLA, has vowed to fight the private foundations behind this effort, including the Broad, Keck and Walton Family foundations that have over the years been central to supporting the corporatization of large charter management organizations and disrupting the collective bargaining efforts of teachers unions. by
For the first time this presidential election cycle, six Republican candidates will be forced to talk about education - an issue that has taken a backseat to others for the last few election cycles. 
