Greetings!

Welcome to the November 4th, edition of the HML POST
More about the Horace Mann League of the USA at  HML website.

Recent research and editorials about America's public schools.  Click on the title to access the full article.

Did you know ------   Highest Paid State Public Employee

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach. Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches and 13 basketball coaches.

Source:  The Financial Times

 

 

Seismic Shifts. Future Forces. Call them whatever you'd like. The Sixteen Trends revealed in this benchmark book will have a profound impact on our future. Noted futurist, educator, communicator, executive and leadership counsel, author, and international speaker Gary Marx makes the case for those trends and speculates on their implications for education and the whole of society. Supported by compelling research and observations, the trends address: aging, diversity, intellectual capital, technology, generations, education, personalization, human ingenuity, continuous improvement, ethics, planetary security, polarization, interdependence, personal meaning, poverty, and careers. 399 pages. 

  

Mass. Ranks 1st In U.S. In Global Education Study  By Denise Lavoie  on WPUR/Boston

Polish up your best "wicked smaht" accents: Massachusetts finished first among U.S. states in a study comparing the academic performance of American students with others around the globe.  The study compared all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Department of Defense Schools to 38 countries who participated in the Trend in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and nine other participating subnational education systems.  

 

 

 Virginia schools boards pass anti-SOL resolutions  by Valarie Strauss in The Washington Post blog.

About 30 school boards in Virginia have passed resolutions that call on education officials to revamp the Standards of Learning testing system, saying that there is "little research" that shows that students "will be better prepared to succeed in their careers and college" by taking the 34 standardized tests the state gives to each child between grades 3-11.  

  

 

 Harvard EdCast: Understanding a Bully (A podcast with the author.) by Matt Weber.  

 

In the new book, Bullying and Cyberbullying: What Every Educator Needs to Know, published by Harvard Education Press,  nationally recognized bullying expert Elizabeth Kandel Englander - professor of psychology and the founder and director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University - dispels pervasive myths and misconceptions about peer cruelty, bullying, and cyberbullying, and shows educators how they can identify and work to stop the troubling behavior.  In this edition of the EdCast, Englander discusses the book and highlights what every educator needs to know about this subject.

   

 

 

 The Great Voucher Fraud  by Simon Brown in Church and State.

Voucher Plans Don't Boost Student Performance. They Harm Public Education. So Why Do They Keep Growing In The States?    The American people remain skeptical of vouchers. A poll released by Phi Beta Kappa and Gallup in August found that 70 percent of Americans oppose plans to shift public funding into private and religious schools through voucher plans, the highest number in the poll's 20-year history.  Yet despite this, more states than ever are piling onto the "school choice" bandwagon. In 2013 alone, 15 states either expanded or created voucher or "neo-voucher" programs -  a system of generous tax credits that are vouchers by another name. 

 

 

When states won millions in Race to the Top funding, they
found themselves required to spend more than they received from the federal government. School districts are spending billions to offer and test the Common Core standards, which have until recently been untested. Now that they were tested in Kentucky and New York, we know that the Common Core tests cause a dramatic score decline.

 

 

Teacher Working Conditions in Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools: A Comparative Study    by Yongmei Ni  in the Teachers College Record

This research article compares teacher working conditions in charter and traditional public schools and among various types of charter schools. In doing so, it seeks to understand whether the different working conditions are influenced by the intrinsic institutional features of charter schools such as autonomy and competition, or by the extraneous factors such as measureable school and teacher characteristics.

 

 

 

 

Reprinted with permission.

 

 

About Us

Evelyn Blose-Holman, (ret.) Superintendent, Bay Shore Schools, NY