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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: 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.
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Media Matters
The federal Food and Drug Administration has a rigorous process for approving new drugs of all types. While it is far from perfect, it includes several phases, including tests on animals, then on small groups of humans before companies are allowed to bring them to market.
The federal 
Parents also have rights under FERPA (although those rights have been reduced 
The Founding Fathers believed that religion was and must remain a private matter, because bringing the volatility of "religious enthusiasm" into politics would destabilize our new nation. They feared the political effects of interdenominational hostility, the polarization caused by doctrinal differences, and the demonization of dissenters.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision provided a catalyst to advance but not fully achieve racial and economic justice. Sixty years later, Republicans and Democrats alike continue to talk about race, poverty and education. However, there is a chasm in current education policies between proclamations of intent and real effects.
If you follow the education policy debate at all, you know that critics are often called "defenders of the status quo" by people pushing market-based school reforms. Here is a piece about why it is actually the reforms that are preserving the status quo - and what real reform would actually look like. It was written by Arthur H. Camins.
Since the announcement of Race to the Top, schools have become even more obsessed with test scores than they were under No Child Left Behind (which still exists in law). To be eligible to get a portion of Race to the Top's $4.35 billion, states had to agree to evaluate their teachers to a significant degree by the test scores of their students. Later, when states needed waivers from NCLB's mandate that every child must be proficient by 2014 or their schools would be labeled "failing," Secretary Duncan made the waivers conditional on states' agreement to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students.
Specific question have arisen about using value-added measurement (VAM) to retain, dismiss, and compensate teachers. VAMs are statistical measures of student growth. They employ complex algorithms to figure out how much teachers contribute to their students' learning, holding constant factors such as demographics. And so, at first glance, it would appear reasonable to use VAMs to gauge teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, policy makers have acted on that impression over the consistent objections of researchers who have cautioned against this inappropriate use of VAM.
Tyack and Cuban take great care to demonstrate that much of our concept of progress or regress in education depends greatly upon how we frame questions and what questions we ask (or fail to ask). For example, the great wave of educational expansion in the Progressive Era was influenced by the reformers' beliefs that education could mold society for the better and that their progress was clearly reflected in statistics that showed greater and greater numbers of Americans obtaining more and more education. 
In a shocking decision, 
A two-minute video on an idea to increase classroom discussion of all students.
The title of my speech is "The Future Lies Ahead." This pretty much sums up what people are meant to say at graduations, so I thought I would take care of it in the title and move on to some other business. It has always seemed to me that graduation was a little late to be giving advice but perhaps a few random notes may be of some assistance. 
Recently emerged with the implementation of the California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and the NCLB Act of 2001 is an increase in the number of education production function studies estimating the relationship between educational inputs and APIs. While the majority of past research on California school performance focuses on the impacts of different demographic measures and school resources on API scores at interschool level, few are done to study the effects of changes in similar factors on performance gain at intraschool level. Given that school performance is to be measured against oneself over time under California's current accountability system, the need is great to understand how school performance gain is affected by changes in student demographics and school characteristics within the school.
In 1840 Mann wrote 