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Welcome to the Tuesday, January 22, 2019, edition of the
HML Post
.
The
HML Post is a weekly review of recent of articles about educational research and leadership articles. T
he HML Post is a service provide by the members of the League.
Last week's HML Post, click here. The "New" HML Blog site, click here.
Donations are welcomed and appreciated.
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Quote of the Week
In the superintendency, expecially, friends come and go, but enemies seem to accumulate.
a mentoring (retired) superintendent
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Horace Mann League' s Annual Conference
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Kevin Welner and Bill Mathis of the National Educaton Policy center
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The 98th Annual Meeting of the Horace Mann League will be on Friday, February 15, 2019, at noon, at the J.W. Marriott Hotel near the LA Convention Center, and held in conjunction with AASA's Conference.
Why Educators Use It, and Why They Don't
- There are probably countless reasons why educators use research and just as many reasons to explain why they don't. So, in an effort to bridge that gap between the two, I wanted to list a few reasons.
- Why Educators Use Research:
- Fits their context- First and foremost, we use research when it fits our context.
- Social media- Those educators we follow Tweet about it.
- District makes them- The district says this is extremely important, or they want to "pilot it."
The Reasons We Don't:
- Too complicated- Why do researchers have to use so many numbers and educational words?
- Not relevant- Not sure where this fits in with my reality.
- Not enough time- I have PLC meetings, faculty meetings, district-required meetings, and grades to do.
Researchers and Educators Don't Always Communicate.
(Learn more.)
If you're leading a virtual team,
how do you make your team meetings productive and useful for everyone? For women in this role, it helps if you think of yourself as the "agent of connection.
"The main challenge in virtual meetings is you want to recreate the human connection." Virtual meetings may be even more vital than onsite meetings, because remote staff may not get to know each other otherwise. "That's the gathering space. "When you can't be in person, you have to be virtually in person...they call it V.I.P."
- Establish the meeting's purpose, end goal, and agenda.
- Assign roles. Team members can take on rotating roles to help the meeting run smoothly.
- Set meeting rules and protocols.
- On phone meetings, draw out the "Silent Riders."
- Use video conferencing whenever possible. "Video creates the ability to almost be there," (Learn more.)
Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay, according to the 2018 PDK Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.
Even as most Americans continue to say they have high trust and confidence in teachers, a majority also say they don't want their own children to become teachers, most often citing poor pay and benefits as the primary reason for their reluctance.
These findings are part of the 50th annual PDK Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, which queried U.S. adults about a range of issues confronting education, including teacher pay and the teaching profession, school security, options for improving the public schools, perceptions of opportunities for different groups of children, college affordability, the value of a college degree, and school schedules. (
Learn more.)
This week, Republican lawmakers
held a press conference on Capitol Hill to kick off National School Choice Week, an annual event that began in 2011 under President Obama who
proclaimed it as a time to "recognize the role public charter schools play in providing America's daughters and sons with a chance to reach their fullest potential." This year, Democratic lawmakers took a pass on the celebration. You can thank striking teachers for that.
In the latest teacher strike in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest school system, some 30,000 teachers walked off the job saying unchecked growth of charter schools and charters' lack of transparency and accountability have become an unsustainable drain on the public system's financials. The teachers have included in their demands a cap on charter school growth, along with other demands, such as increased teacher pay, reduced class sizes, less testing, and more counselors, nurses, librarians, and psychologists.
The LA teachers' opposition to charter schools is just the latest voice in a growing chorus of public school teachers calling on politicians to do more to support the public schools we have rather than piling more dollars and accolades onto a competitive charter school industry. And with the backing of nearly 80 percent of Los Angeles County residents,
according to one survey, the teachers likely have the clout to change the politics of "school choice" in California, and perhaps the nation. (
Learn more.)
In the world of business, it's something of a running joke. PowerPoint
presentations can often feel like torture.
Why? The problem is PowerPoint® itself, because of the way it's designed.
Open up PowerPoint to create a new document. You'll notice that the default is a bullet-point list, which is the worst possible format to use in a presentation. No one in any audience wants to read a laundry list of information. Or have it read to them.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution. Replace the bullet points with interesting and informing charts, graphs, and other attention-grabbing visuals.
Here's an example of the same information from a boring bullet-point slide presented as a bar chart. There's just no comparison. (
Learn more.)
When you attend an athletic event that involves your son or daughter, cheer to your heart's content, enjoy the camaraderie that high school sports offer and have fun. But when it comes to verbally criticizing game officials or coaches, cool it.
Make no mistake about it. Your passion is admired, and your support of the hometown team is needed. But so is your self-control. Yelling, screaming and berating the officials humiliates your child, annoys those sitting around you, embarrasses your child's school and is the primary reason Ohio has an alarming shortage of high school officials.
It's true.
According to a recent survey by the National Association of Sports Officials, more than 75 percent of all high school officials say "adult behavior" is the primary reason they quit. And 80 percent of all young officials hang up their stripes after just two years of whistle blowing. Why? They don't need your abuse. (
Learn more.)
As someone who's worked in a range of schools, from inner-city schools to private boarding schools, I've concluded that there's a straightforward explanation for why students in the inner city do relatively well through 3rd grade, then begin to fall by the wayside.
It's because of the amount of time that students from different backgrounds are engaged with school and school-related activities.
Let's begin by looking at attendance rates in a range of schools, using high schools as the point of comparison:
- Urban schools. The average daily attendance for urban high school students is 70% to 75%, but for simplicity's sake, make it 80%.
- Suburban schools. Most suburban kids come to school every day, and the day is likely to be six to seven hours.
- Private schools. At independent day schools, students are rarely absent, extensive homework is a given, and after-school activities are required.
- Boarding schools. Students in these schools have long instructional days, required extracurricular activities, and supervised study in the evenings. (Learn more.)
School system leaders can't do everything, but they can do a lot to make teaching jobs more professional.
If you haven't yet read journalist Dana Goldstein's 2014 book The Teacher Wars, I highly recommend that you do so. Goldstein, now with the New York Times, offers an engaging, thoughtful, and well-researched account of how teachers' work has evolved over the past two centuries. As she describes, public education in the U.S. has long relied on a mostly female teaching force controlled by male administrators using top-down forms of management.
It may seem obvious to many that teachers should be treated as professionals - applying their knowledge, experience, and expertise to the complex work of instruction - but the culture and traditions of schools have continually undermined efforts to give teaching a truly professional status.
Goldstein concludes with 11 recommendations for promoting teacher professionalism.
#1. Increase teacher pay.
#2. Support professional learning communities.
#3. Find ways for teachers to keep learning and growing.
#4. Make teacher preparation programs tougher and more prestigious.
#5. Don't forget the principal.
#6. Use tests as diagnostic tools.
#7. Encourage teachers to observe each other.
#8. Bring more men and teachers of color into the profession.
#9. Renegotiate seniority rules for teachers.
#10. Encourage experimentation.
The truth is, the process of success and achieving your wildest dreams is not rocket science.
Often it simply requires you show up day after day.
When you give your attention to a singular focus day in, day out for a set period of time, no matter how small, it's inevitable that you'll get closer to where you want to be. Opportunities will begin to present themselves.
"When you show up and keep putting your work out there, good things start to happen. You make new connections, people reach out to you, opportunities start to present themselves."
You Can't Be the Noun Without Doing the Verb. (
Learn more.)
Linda Darling Hammond - HML Board of Directors
Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University where she founded the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and served as the faculty sponsor of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, which she helped to redesign.
Darling-Hammond is past president of the American Educational Research Association and recipient of its awards for Distinguished Contributions to Research, Lifetime Achievement, and Research-to-Policy. She is also a member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Education. From 1994-2001, she was executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, whose 1996 report What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future was named one of the most influential reports affecting U.S. education in that decade. In 2006, Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation's ten most influential people affecting educational policy. In 2008, she served as the leader of President Barack Obama's education policy transition team.
Darling-Hammond began her career as a public school teacher and co-founded both a preschool and a public high school. She served as Director of the RAND Corporation's education program and as an endowed professor at Columbia University, Teachers College. She has consulted widely with federal, state and local officials and educators on strategies for improving education policies and practices. Among her more than 500 publications are a number of award-winning books, including The Right to Learn, Teaching as the Learning Profession, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World and The Flat World and Education. She received an Ed.D. from Temple University (with highest distinction) and a B.A. from Yale University (magna cum laude).
Linda is in her third term as a member of the Horace Mann League's Board of Directors.
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Cartoon of the Week
Click
here to register for the 2019 Annual Meeting.
The 2019 Outstanding Friend of Public Education- Dr. Henry Levin
Dr. Henry Levin,
Professor of
Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Dr. Levin's special areas of interest are: Economics of education, cost-effectiveness analysis, school reform, and privatization. He is Co-Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education.
The 2019 Outstanding Public Educator- Dr. Jeanne Oakes
Dr. Jeanne Oakes is Presidential Professor Emeritus in Educational Equity at UCLA. She focuses her time with the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) on projects related to
deeper learning, teacher preparation, and resource equity. She plays a leadership role in both the resource equity work, as well as LPI's work with the Partnership for the Future of Learning.
The 2019 Outstanding Friend of the Horace Mann League - Andy Schaefer and Discovery Education.
Andy Schaefer, as Vice President of Discovery Education, has over the past ten years, been a strong advocate of public education and the mission and purpose of the Horace Mann League. During the ten-year span, Andy has assisted the League in building a stronger relationship with our corporate partners.
The 98th Annual Meeting of the Horace Mann League will be on Friday, February 15, 2019, at noon, at the J.W. Marriott Hotel near the LA Convention Center, and held in conjunction with AASA's Conference.
Click here to register for the 2019 Annual Meeting.
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Our Valued Corporate Partners
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The Superintendent's Special topics:
Sponsor a Professional Colleague for membership
in
the Horace Mann League.
Click here to download the "Sponsor a Colleague" form.
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
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. Eric King, Superintendent, (ret.) Muncie Public Schools, IN
President-elect:
Dr. Laurie Barron, Superintendent, Evergreen Schools, Kalispell, MT.
Vice President: Dr.
Lisa Parady, Exec. Dir. Alaska Assoc. of School Ad., Juneau, AK
Past President:
Dr. Martha Bruckner, Exec.Dir., MOEC Collective Impact, Omaha, NE
Directors:
Dr.
Ruben Alejandro, Supt.
of
Schools, (ret.) Weslaco, TX
Dr.
David Berliner, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Dr.
Talisa Dixon, Supt. of Schools, Cleveland Heights - University Heights, OH
Mr.
Jeffery Charbonneau, Middle school Principal, Zillah Schools, 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, Mesa Public Schools, AZ
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 USD, Elk Grove, CA
Dr.
Stan Olson, President, Silverback Learning, (former supt.
of
Boise Schools, ID)
Dr.
Martin Brooks, Executive Director, Tri-State Consortium,
Setauket, NY
Dr.
Kevin Riley, Superintendent, Gretna Community Schools, NE
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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