Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Last month, a former student from my school came back to interview me on zero tolerance policies for a research paper that she was writing for her graduate program. Her questions really got me thinking about the purpose and the effectiveness of this approach in schools. Designed to eradicate students from engaging in certain behaviors, zero tolerance policies generally call for punishing any infraction of a rule, regardless of the severity, or whether or not the infraction was due to a mistake, ignorance, or an extenuating circumstance. The most common use of these policies is for the possession of drugs and/or weapons in schools. They gained popularity in the mid-nineties after federal legislation was passed that required states to expel students who brought firearms to school for a year or risk losing federal funding. Today, many schools are rethinking the effectiveness and usefulness of such policies. When my former student asked me if I felt a suspension from school was ...

To test or not to test? That seems to be the question these days when it comes to state-run standardized testing that is used to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable. Most educators agree that this accountability is necessary, but when faced with countless hours of lost instructional time to administer tests that seem to have little or no direct correlation to the work that is happening in the classroom, many are left to wonder whether or not the over-testing should continue. In New Hampshire, the question was never whether or not to take a standardized test. Rather, the Granite State set out to build a better mousetrap. Late last week, The United States Department of Education Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education Deb Delisle announced in a letter to New Hampshire Commissioner of Education Dr. Virginia M. Barry that four school districts in New Hampshire would be granted a waiver to move forward with an innovative pilot known officially as th...

The following announcement comes from Dr. Brian Blake, Superintendent of Schools for the Sanborn Regional School District: Two weeks ago, Governor Maggie Hassan and New Hampshire Department of Education (NHDOE) Commissioner Virginia Barry announced that the U.S. Department of Education approved a new pilot program for accountability strategy for measuring school success. The model, known simply as Performance Assessment for Competency Education (PACE), was developed by the State in partnership with Sanborn and three other school districts (Rochester, Epping, and Souhegan). These four districts were chosen to develop this model because we are considered leaders in competency education, a system designed to increase both rigor and college and career readiness in all classrooms and grade levels. The PACE model is based on the idea that one single standardized test taken in each grade level would no longer be the single measure of a school’s success. Instead, the standa...

In the classic movie Back to the Future, in a scene that takes place in 1955, Biff “the bully” is seen demanding that Marty McFly’s father (the classic nerd) do his homework for him, but he is smart enough to know what to do so he won’t get caught cheating. “I gotta have time to recopy it. Do you realize what would happen if I handed in my homework in your handwriting? I'll get kicked out of school. You wouldn't want that to happen would you?,” he explains to Marty’s dad one day when he gave him the homework assignment late. Plagiarism is not a new issue, but with the rise of resources available to students on the web, it has become a whole new game of cat and mouse between students and teachers. It has become very easy for students to simply cut and paste directly from the web into a document that they could submit as their own work. Plagiarism, the act of submitting work that is not one’s own, continues to be a concern that schools, both high schools and college...