The HML Post
 
 
Greetings!
 
Welcome to the December 23rd, edition of the HML POST

First, Merry Christmas!

More about the Horace Mann League of the USA at  HML website.

The HML Annual Meeting/Luncheon is on Friday, February 14, 2014, at the Omni Hotel in Nashville - in conjunction with the AASA Nation Conference.
Check out HML's Cornerstone on "FLIPBOARD."   (The public schools are the "Cornerstone" of our democracy.)

 

"Imagine going into a school.

What do you see? What do you hear the teachers and other staff members saying? What do the bulletin boards look like? How easy was it to enter the school? What are the children saying and doing? How noisy is it? Do you feel welcome or afraid? What is the general "feel" of the environment? All these questions and more pertain to the underlying stream of values and rituals that pervade schools. This underlying stream is the culture of that particular school."

 

 

"In the last  post, I described a visit to a Southern California urban high school's four social studies classes where the dominant culture expressed values of doing the least amount of work to pass the academic course. For most of the students, classroom habits revealed far more tedium than enthusiasm for, or even interest in, learning. Most of the disengaged students treated the classes like buzzing mosquitoes that had to be endured for 43 minutes before freedom came when bells ended the period."

 

 

A Letter From The District Superintendent  by Kate Morrison in Funny Times   (www.funnytimes.com) 

Dear Parents:

All of us in the District are eager and excited to begin what promises to be our most successful year to date.

First, we are proud to announce that the entire District is now dedicated to serving only Gifted and Special Needs students. This change comes after a review of last year's student records revealed that there were no "Regular-Ed" students left.  

 

 

 

 

Boston Study: What Higher Standardized Test Scores Don't Mean  by Carey Goldberg  in  WBUR Commonwealth Health 

The MIT researchers avoid loaded terms like intelligence, so let me be the blunt one and sum up a provocative new Boston-based study coming out soon in the leading psychology journal Psychological Science:  If you're a kid who's lucky enough to go to a school that boosts your performance on standardized tests like the MCAS, you're scoring higher because you know more, but probably not because you've gotten smarter.

 

About Pearson, the Golden Goose State Standards, And Then Some  by Mercedes Schneider  in Mercedes Schneider's EduBlog

"On December 13, 2013, Pearson, Inc., agreed to pay a $7.7 million settlement for allegedly using its nonprofit, Pearson Charitable Foundation (PCF), to assist its profit-making parent corporation in developing educational materials- including software.  In this post, I would like to offer additional discussion of Pearson the For-Profit, Pearson the Nonprofit, and some friends both have made along the Common Core way."

  

"Millions of laid-off American factory workers were the first to realize that they were competing against job seekers around the globe with comparable skills but far smaller paychecks. But a similar fate also awaits workers who aspire to high-skilled, high-paying jobs in engineering and technical fields unless this country learns to prepare them to compete for the challenging work that the new global economy requires." 

  

  

DEAR MOUNTAIN ROOM PARENTS   by Maria Semple  MARIA    

Hi, everyone!

The Mountain Room is gearing up for its Day of the Dead celebration on Friday. Please send in photos of loved ones for our altar. All parents are welcome to come by on Wednesday afternoon to help us make candles and decorate skulls.

  

 
 
It's been a big year for innovations in learning. If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, 2013 was the year blended learning went mainstream-even schools that were just layering tabs on top of an obsolete model called it "blended." The following are 14 developments to watch for in 2014. 

  

  

Some articles about public education on HML's Flipboard.
  • Major Charter School Chain's Classrooms Look Like Cubicles for Telemarketers
  • New Research Study: Incentives with No Impact
  • Classroom Management: Training our Future Teachers
  • Education innovation: A case study in what not to do
  • The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform
  • Presumed Averageness: The Mis-Application of Classical Hypothesis Testing in Education
  • Education Isn't Broken, Our Country Is  

 

 


Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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: Joe Hairston, President, Vision Unlimited, Reisterstown, MD
President-elect: Gary Marx, President, Center for Public Outreach, VA
Vice President: Charles Fowler, Executive Director, Suburban School Superintendents
1st Past President: Mark Edwards, Supt., Mooresville Graded Schools, NC
2nd Past President: Julie Underwood, Dean, Sch. of Ed. U. of WI, Madison, WI
3rd Past President: George Garcia, (ret.) Supt., Boulder Valley Schools, CO
4th Past President: Steve Rasmussen, Supt., Issaquah School District, WA

 

Directors:
Martha Bruckner, Supt., Council Bluffs Community Schools, IA
Evelyn Blose-Holman, (ret.) Superintendent, Bay Shore Schools, NY
Carol Choye, Instructor, Bank Street College, NY
Brent Clark, Exec. Dir., Illinois Assoc. of School Admin. IL
Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education, Stanford U. CA
Charles Fowler, Exec. Dir., Suburban School Superintendents, NH
James Harvey, Exec. Dir., Superintendents Roundtable, WA
William Hite, Supt., Philadelphia City Public Schools, PA
Christine Johns, Superintendent, Sterling Heights, Michigan 
Eric King, Superintendent, (Ret.) Muncie Public Schools, IN
Steven Ladd, Superintendent, Elk Grove Unified School District, Elk Grove, CA 
Barry Lynn, Exec. Dir., Americans United, Washington, DC
Stan Olson, Superintendent, (Ret.) Boise Public Schools, ID

 

Executive Director:
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.