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Happy New Year Edition
January 11, 2016
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2015 Awardees: Drs. Pedro Noguera, Gene Carter and Mark Edwards
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The 2016 HML Annual Meeting is an opportunity to visit with leaders and advocates of public education, as well as exchange ideas with colleagues.
The HML Annual Luncheon is recognized by many as the most esteemed event of the AASA Conference. Don't miss this special event, register now.
Click here to register.
Special awards will be presented to the following at the annual meeting followed by remarks by:
Outstanding Friend of Public Education award:
Andy Hargreaves is the Chair in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Andy has authored or edited over 30 books, several of which have achieved outstanding writing awards for the AERA, the ALA, and the AACTE. One of these, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (with Micheal Fullan, 2012), has received three awards.
His most recent book is Uplifting Leadership (with Alan Boyle and Alma Harris) published by Jossey Bass Business, 2014.
Outstanding Public Educator award:
Gene Glass
is a researcher working in educational psychology and the
social sciences
. He coined the term "
meta-analysis
" and illustrated its first use in 1976. Gene Glass is a Regents' Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University in both the educational leadership and psychology in education divisions, having retired in 2010.
Currently, Glass is a senior researcher at the
National Education Policy Center
and a research professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Outstanding Friend of the Horace Mann League award:
Gary Marx is the author of the recently published,
Twenty-one Trends for the 21st Century: Out of the Trenches and into the Future.
Gary is the President of the Center for Public Outreach and the Past President of the Horace Mann League.
Anyone over the age of 40 who is familiar with public schools knows that similar reforms come again and again as if policy makers suffered amnesia. Consider, for example, the fundamental (and familiar) question that has launched periods of reform like changing seasons:
Should all students study the same content and acquire the same skills?
The policy question was asked initially in the 1890s-a politically
conservative era-and answered yes. Then two decades later after World War I, policymakers working in a
liberal political climate, asked the question and answered no. Students should be able to choose whether they want to go to college, work in white- and blue-collar jobs. Then in the late 1950s in the middle of the Cold War-a politically conservative era, the policy question arose again and the answer was yes;
all students should study rigorous subject matter in math, sciences, and social studies. Between the 1960s and the 1970s, policymakers asked the question again, and answered it yes at one time and no at another.
And since the early 1980s ( a Nation at Risk report being a marker of that politically conservative era) the curriculum standards, testing, and accountability movement now including the Common Core standards, all students are expected to learn the same content and skills. (
Read more.)
When, about 30 years ago, corporate interests began their highly organized, well-funded effort to privatize public education, you wouldn't have read or heard about it. They didn't want to trigger the debate that such a radical change in an important institution warranted.
If, like most pundits and politicians, you've supported that campaign, it's likely you've been snookered. Here's a quick overview of the snookering process.
The Pitch
Talking Points: (a) Standardized testing proves America's schools are poor. (b) Other countries are eating our lunch. (c) Teachers deserve most of the blame. (d) The lazy ones need to be forced out by performance evaluations. (e) The dumb ones need scripts to read or "canned standards" telling them exactly what to teach. (f) The experienced ones are too set in their ways to change and should be replaced by fresh Five-Week-Wonders from Teach for America. (Bonus: Replacing experienced teachers saves a ton of money.) (g) Public ("government") schools are a step down the slippery slope to socialism. (
Read more
.)
To restore greatness in public education we need to return and restore those principles, which are truly effective and not engage in pseudo reforms that have proven to be unworkable.
Geoff Thomas is the superintendent of the Rexberg, ID schools, the 2016 Idaho Superintendent of the Year, and a member of the League.
 2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But it should also be remembered as the year another established order was forever altered by change, dissent and revelations of its corruption.
For years, an out-of-touch establishment has dominated education policy too. A well-funded elite has labeled public education as generally a failed enterprise and insisted that only a regime of standardized testing and charter schools can make schools and educators more "accountable." Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum have adopted this narrative of "reform" and now easily slip into the rhetoric that supports it without hesitation. (Read more.)
 Florida has invested heavily in privately run charter schools for years, and the payoff for taxpayers has been uneven at best.
While some successful charter schools fill particular needs in local communities, too many have failed and research shows they have not outperformed traditional public schools in the state. Taxpayers also have lost millions in construction costs and other capital investments when charter schools have closed, and state lawmakers should revisit the oversight and funding for these schools.
The state has lost as much as $70 million in money for construction, rent and other costs when charter schools have closed over the last 15 years, a recent Associated Press analysis found. (
Read more.)
It's been a rough year for standardized testing-the timed, fill-in-the-bubble-with-a-No. 2-pencil mental gauntlets feared by students,
loathed by teachers
, and loved by education policy makers, perhaps because they no longer have to take them. Testing started in earnest decades ago as a measure of academic skills and intensified in 2002 as education policy specialists suggested it could help students in the United States catch up with their global peers and measure how well public school teachers are doing their jobs.
But over the course of 2015, there were major disturbances in the testing universe. Students, with their parents' blessing,
chose not to take them; a growing number of colleges questioned their usefulness; and arguably the biggest official proponent of testing decided to leave his post. Here are the top six moments of 2015 that will influence what happens in classrooms next year.
6. Computer Problems With Standardized Test Scoring
5. ACT, SAT, OUT: More Colleges Dropping Tests as Admission Requirement
4. Atlanta Cheating Scandal Concludes
3. Explosion of the Opt-Out Anti-Test Movement
2. Education Secretary Arne Duncan Resigns
1. No Child Left Behind Is Scrapped (
Read more.
)
 One teacher grew up in an integrated system and became the North Carolina's teacher of the year. Now he wonders about the future for his students, who are growing up in an increasingly divided system.
ON THE FIRST DAY of every semester during my five years as a teacher at Garinger High School, I had a candid talk with my students about how the world perceives them. The school, sitting off of Eastway Drive in east Charlotte, is high-poverty, majority-minority, and distinctly urban. I knew, from my own experiences, exactly what "type" of school this was, and I didn't shy away from telling the kids.
I told them that many people didn't expect much from their population, because of where they live and what they look like. That they all fit into somebody's stereotype. I told them that students who go to a school such as Garinger are less likely to graduate than students elsewhere.
I told them it was a setup of sorts. Then I waited, reading the responses on their faces. Some pouted, sulking in a sense of internalized low self-worth. Others were visibly angry, as if I had confirmed something they never had the language to articulate. (
Read more.)
 Education professor Paul Thomas has raised a powerful challenge to the state of education journalism in two recent posts.
The first post tackles an article by New York Times reporter Motoko Rich, focused on the latest supposed crisis in education, that not enough high schoolers graduate "college and career ready." Thomas provides a clear refutation of many of the
faulty premises on which Rich bases her story, pointing out that similar wails regarding our schools have been heard for the past hundred years, with no evidence to support them. He writes:
The nebulous relationship between the quality of education in the U.S. and the fragility of the U.S. economy simply has never existed. Throughout the past century, no one has ever found any direct or clear positive correlation between measures of educational quality in the U.S. and the strength of the U.S. economy. (Read more.)
Keith Brannon on the Tulane University site.
"School vouchers programs encourage families to exit public schools for private schools," said study co-author
Jane Arnold Lincove
, ERA-New Orleans associate director. "Our goal is to understand how families make those decisions."
The study uses data from the city's OneApp system, a centralized application for public schools. Eleven percent of applicants ranked both voucher and public schools, indicating a willingness to attend a public school if they don't win a voucher in the lottery. Key findings regarding these families' choices include:
* When comparing schools with similar student demographics and locations, the average family applying for a voucher will choose a private school over a public one, even if the private school's voucher recipients have lower performance on state standardized tests. (Read more.)
Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, found that students at online charter schools saw dramatically worse outcomes than their counterparts at traditional, brick-and-mortar schools. Over the course of a year, cyber school students lost out on the equivalent of 180 days of learning in math and 72 days reading, the center said. (
Read more.)
 Where will public schools be in a year?
Here is a quick primer on some of the key issues that relate to the fundamental question: Will America maintain or destroy that most basic democratic institution, the public school?
Are Public Schools "Failing"?
The idea that public schools have "failed" and that private market solutions are the answer to this problem is the heart of a campaign promoted by rightwing foundations, particularly the
Bradley Foundation, over the last 30 years.
Recent cuts in school budgets by Bradley-supported politicians, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, are creating more "failure."
As Wisconsin Public Education Network director Heather DuBois Bourenane observes, "The entire myth of the 'failing school' depends on a refusal to acknowledge the ways that poverty impacts local communities, and how austerity policies and years of underfunding have led to the crises we see now." (
Read more.)
Where's the big money in privatization? Take it from the teachers.
 2015 was an important year in education policy, with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the beginning of the 2016 election campaigns, and local fights for teachers and public schools making national headlines.
In an important year for students and teachers across the education spectrum, however, some media outlets used their platforms to push falsehoods. Here are five of the worst media failures on public education this year.
Shop ▾
5. Campbell Brown Hired Transphobic, Sexist, Racially Insensitive Writer To "Fact-Check" Education Policy Reporting
4. National Newspaper Editorials Promoted Anti-Teachers Union Myths
3. Fox News Continued Their Assault On Public Schools, Educators, And Unions
2. Moderators And Candidates Overlooked K-12 Education Issues Throughout The 2015 Debate Season
1. State Newspapers Baselessly Attacked Teachers Unions Across The Country (Read more.)
 The nation's for-profit, private college industry is a study in horror.
Start with the fact that it actually calls itself an "industry." Excuse me, but education is a social investment - not an industrial product.
Next,
this so-called "private" industry depends almost wholly on government money. It generates practically none of its revenue from the free market. Instead, it cons students into taking expensive government-backed loans to invest in educations that seldom deliver increases in their earning potential.
"For-profit" colleges are just that. They maintain that their obligation isn't to serve students or society, but to deliver profits to their corporate shareholders. (
Read more.)
 Relative to the traditional delivery model for K-12 education in America, will school choice lead to more or less integration across America's schools? That question drives some of the debate around parental choice programs. African Americans have historically been segregated from other American students, and consequently, policy discussions have often focused on the segregation they experience. Policies that further segregate schools may harm educational opportunities and lead to less racial harmony in our communities. These studies tend to find that African American students are more racially isolated in the charter schools that their parents chose for them, as compared to the public school district where they reside. (Read more.)
 I published hundreds of posts in 2015, many of them highly popular with readers.
Subjects that drew big audiences included the Common Core State Standards, standardized testing and the opt-out movement, the teaching profession, educational equity and early childhood education. In case you are interested in the posts that drew the largest audiences, here are the Top 10:
Mitchell Robinson, who teaches music at Michigan State University,
writes here about the madness
of assessing teachers by "value-added" or growth measures, especially when they don't teach the tested subjects.
Venessa Keesler, deputy superintendent of accountability services at MDE, said measuring student growth is a "challenging science," but student growth percentiles represent a "powerful and good" way to tackle the topic. "When you don't have a pre-and-post-test, this is a good way to understand how much a student has progressed," she said. Under the new law, 25 percent of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student growth through 2017-18. In 2018-19, the percentage will grow to 40 percent. State standardized tests, where possible, will be used to determine half that growth. In Michigan, state standardized tests - most of which focus on reading and math - touch a minority of teachers. One study estimated that 33 percent of teachers teach in grades and subjects covered by state standardized tests. (Read more.)
What can we expect in 2016?
There are a number of education news stories from 2015 that have the potential to gain greater prominence in 2016.
- Vulnerable Governors: While education will make few if any appearances in the presidential race, that's not the case in state elections for governor.
- Charter Schools: Speaking of charter schools, controversies surrounding these schools will increase as the industry expands.
- The Test Rebellion: Despite the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act that weakens the consequences of nationwide standardized testing, the resistance to these tests that so shook the education establishment in 2015 will likely expand.
- Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a challenge to union collection of dues from employee paychecks, is being closely watched by people who follow education.
- Chicago: In Chicago, a massive teacher strike in 2012, became a catalyst for anationwide movement to protest current education policies that call for more school closures, charter schools, and a test-and-punish regime that's damaging to school children. (Read more.)
 Cindy Omlin's Nov. 29th letter in support of public charter schools commits four sins of omission.
It argues that the Washington state Supreme Court ruling against public charter schools ignores Washington state citizens, disregards the promise of opportunity and choice for teachers and students, and favors "entrenched stakeholders concerned with maintaining their power and the status quo."
First, Omlin, director of Northwest Professional Educators, omits telling readers that her organization wants teachers to forgo unions and relinquish rights to collective bargaining.
Second, Omlin does not admit to how the Supreme Court ruling actually takes citizen interests into account. The court ruled that under present law, public charter schools are not "common schools" and cannot be funded by common school funds.
Third, Omlin ignores a Stanford study that indicates that 71 percent of charter school students are at the same level as public school students or worse. Charter schools are clearly not the opportunity they claim to be, and the choice to invest public funds in them at the expense of public schools is a poor one.
Finally, Omlin avoids being specific about who are "entrenched stakeholders." Well, they are a first-grade teacher, a school librarian, a school counselor - people who serve the community on an average salary of $55,000. Of course, public school teachers are entrenched in power and status when compared to charter school teachers who have an average salary of $41,592. But neither compare to the real entrenched stakeholders as reported by the New York Daily News. Charter school executives like Eva Moskowitz of Success Charter Network gets a salary of $316,570 and David Levin, KIPP co-founder and superintendent, follows close behind with $296,750. Public charter schools drain funds from public schools. Perhaps we should follow the money. (Read more.)
 It's been a tumultuous year for America's schools-one marked by an expanding minority-student population, an increasingly discontent teaching force, a backlash against standardized testing, and shifting understanding of education reform. It's seen greater attention on areas traditionally dismissed as nonessential: things like early-childhood education, after-school programs, and project-based learning. It's also seen evolving attitudes toward discipline, with tactics such as restorative justice starting to replace zero-tolerance approaches, including in high-poverty urban districts. Debates over how to address disparities in achievement have been highly politicized. The ed-tech market has continued to grow.
Education is often touted as a means for boosting social mobility and making communities more equal, but inequality in school funding and resources has made that difficult to achieve, especially amid increasing poverty rates. (
Read more.)
 Rural towns struggle with widespread poverty, limited opportunity, and low college-attendance rates. What role do schools play in improving the quality of life?
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.
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| Dr. Andy Hargreaves Outstanding Friend of Public Education. Professor and Author, Boston College |
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Dr. Gene Glass
Outstanding Public
Education. Professor and Author, National Education Policy Center
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Gary Marx
Outstanding Friend of the League. Author and Past President of the HML, President of Public Outreach
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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)
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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