The HML Post 
 
 
Greetings!
 
Welcome to the July 14th edition of the HML POST

 

The main HML website, click here.
Check out HML's Cornerstone on "FLIPBOARD."   (The public schools are the "Cornerstone" of our democracy.)
 
Participate in the "one" question survey about what you would do to implement a long-term effort to improve student achievement, if funding were not an issue.  Results will be in next week's HML Post.  
 
 
 
 A view of the future through kindergarten demographics    by Jens Manuel Krogstad  on the Pew Research Center blog

Today's kindergartners offer a glimpse of tomorrow's demographics. A new data analysis by Pew Research Center finds a big increase over the past decade in the number of states where at least one-in-five public school kindergartners are Latino.  There are 17 states where Latino children comprise at least 20% of the public school kindergarten population, according to our analysis of 2012 Census Bureau data. By comparison, just eight states had such a composition a decade earlier, in 2000.

 

Eva Moskowitz makes $72 per student as CEO of the private Success Academy in New York City.
Carmen Farina makes 19 cents per student as Chancellor of New York City Public Schools.
More salary shock: The salaries of eight executives of the K12 chain, which gets over 86 percent of its profits from the taxpayers, went from $10 million to over $21 million in one year.
A McKinsey report estimates that education can be a $1.1 trillion business in the United States. Forbesnotes: "The charter school movement [is] quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit." The big-money people are ready to pounce, like Rupert Murdoch, who called K-12 "a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed."    

  

 

Benefits of Head Start and Early Head Start Programs  by the National Head Start Association.  
Economic Benefit: Research shows that HS is a wise investment for society. The  preliminary results of a randomly selected longitudinal study of more than 600 HS graduates in San Bernardino County, California, showed that society receives nearly $9 in benefits  for every $1 invested in these HS children. These benefits  include increased earnings, employment, and family stability,  and decreased welfare dependency, crime costs, grade repetition, and special education.

  

  

  

This aspect of school reform has been lurking around the edges for some time-- the notion that once we find the super-duper teachers, we could somehow shuffle everybody around and put the supery-duperest in front of the neediest students. But though reformsters have occasionally floated the idea, the feds have been reluctant to really push it.  

  

  

The Elite's Politics Are Squelching Everyone Else's Right to Culture  by Jon Wisman and Aaron Pacitti in the Huffington Post

Weakened support for public education especially handicaps the poor. The educational achievement gap between children from rich and poor families is roughly 30 to 40 percent greater for those born in 2001 than those born in the mid-1970s, leaving many without the skills necessary for our more complex economy.   But it gets worse. The cultural component of education is being gutted. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the New Common Core standards that require that 70 percent of the reading assignments of high school seniors be nonfiction.

 

 

The recent decision by the Obama administration to scrutinize teacher education programs comes as no surprise to teacher educators. Perceived under-performance by teachers, especially in urban schools, has drawn a lot of criticism. Policy makers and elected officials looking to allocate blame for the failures of urban schools have hit on a familiar and vulnerable target: university-based teacher preparation.

Without much evidence, they have convinced many tax-payers that poorly prepared teachers are the problem. Stories about uncaring teachers who lack sufficient knowledge of math to teach second graders abound in the media.

 

 

Obama highlights push for better skilled teachers    by Kimberly Hefling in the Sacramento Bee

President Barack Obama brought forward a new administration effort Monday to place quality teachers in schools that need them the most.

Obama said the U.S. education system has "a problem" in that students who would benefit the most from having skilled or experienced teachers in their classrooms are least likely to get them, including black and Hispanic students.

  

 

  

4 Belief Statements Underlying Student Performance   by Tom Vander Ark in the Getting Smart blog
David Dockterman would like to see more productive failure. But as a lecturer at Harvard's GSE, Dockterman sees students afraid to blemish a polished transcript. As Scholastic's chief architect of learning sciences, he sees K-12 students all too familiar with failure and schools that don't know how to support productive struggle.
 
 
The Excellent But False Messaging of the Common Core Standards  by Diane Ravitch on the Ravitch Blog. 
Have you ever wondered about the amazingly effective campaign to sell the Common Core standards to the media, the business community, and the public? How did it happen that advocates for the standards used the same language, the same talking points, the same claims, no matter where they were located? The talking points sounded poll-tested because they were. The language was the same because it came from the same source. The campaign to have "rigorous," "high standards" that would make ALL students "college and career-ready" and "globally competitive" was well planned and coordinated. There was no evidence for these claims but repeated often enough in editorials and news stories and in ads by major corporations, they took on the ring of truth. 
 
Mercedes Schneider  on the  deutsch29 Blog 

Mercedes Schneider finds it remarkable the degree to which AFT and Randi Weingarten will go in order to protect and promote CCSS. One of the more telling pieces is a post Weingarten wrote for Huffington Post entitled, Will States Fail the Common Core?- As though CCSS is a personality, complete with feelings that will be hurt by states' betrayal. In that post, Weingarten maintains that CCSS is "not a silver bullet" but that the problem is not with CCSS but with "bad execution."

  

 

  

Welcome to other side of the looking glass, and into the Bizarro world of so-called "education reform" - an upside-down universe in which up is down, left is right and multimillionaire CEOs are civil rights heroes championing social justice, while public school teachers are corrupt fat cats, maintaining a status quo which oppresses students in poverty and racism.  

  
3 Reasons Most Presentations Fail   by Geoffery James on the  INC Post.

When sales presentations and pitches fail, it's almost always because the presenter made one of these three basic (and fortunately correctable) mistakes, according to Dean Schantz, CEO of DNA Field Branding:

1. Presenting Too Much Information 

Presenting features and functions is like describing plastics used to make a telephone, rather than what that phone can mean to your life. What your solution IS and DOES has much less emotional impact than what it MEANS to them. Do this instead . . . 

  

6 Things the Most Productive People Do Every Day   by Tim Ferriss on The Week blog

Below are six tips offered by Tim, author of the international bestseller,  The 4-Hour Work Week, and the science behind why they work, and insight from the most productive people around.

1) Manage your mood

2) Don't check email in the morning

3) Before you try to do it faster, ask whether it should be done at all

4) Focus is nothing more than eliminating distractions

5) Have a personal system

6) Define your goals the night before

 
A Gift:  On the Art of Teaching   by Horace Mann
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)
 
  
  

  

 
 

The Horace Mann League website (click here) contains information about the League's projects, activities, past events, galleries, publications, and much more.
 
 The HML Notes -Spring 2014 Edition, click here to download
 
All of the past issues of the HML Posts are available for review and search purposes.
 
Finally, 6 (Flipboard online) magazines that may be of interest to you.

 

 

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: Gary Marx, President, Center for Public Outreach, Vienna, VA
President-elect: Charles Fowler, Exec. Director, Suburban School Admin. Exter, HN
Vice President: Christine  Johns-Haines, Superintendent, Utica Community Schools, MI
1st Past President: Joe Hairston, President, Vision Unlimited, Reisterstown, MD
2nd Past President: Mark Edwards, Superintendent, Mooresville Graded Schools, NC

Directors:
Laurie Barron, Supt. of Schools, Evergreen School District, Kalispell , MT
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
James Harvey, Exec. Dir., Superintendents Roundtable, WA
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
Kevin Maxwell, CEO, Prince George's County Schools, Upper Marlboro, MD
Stan Olson, Director, Silverback Learning, Boise, ID
Steven Webb, Supt. of Schools, Vancouver School District, WA

 

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.