Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This fall, the daughter of one of my co-workers was eager to start her first school year as a new teacher in a nearby urban school district. After she was hired over the summer and received her classroom keys, she was eager to get into the room to start decorating her space in anticipation of the first day of school. To her dismay, she was shocked to open her classroom door to find an empty, barren room with paint peeling from the walls and stains on the ceiling tiles. Her principal told her there was no money in the budget to paint the room but agreed to let the new teacher fund the project on her own. With that she set to work, painting her classroom a cheery blue color as a backdrop for her posters and classroom decorations. On her first day, she learned one of the hardest lessons of any new teacher: It is expensive to be a teacher. With budget deficits a hot button issue in many school communities, teachers are often left to make up the difference to provide what is nece...

Earlier this month, President-Elect Donald Trump named Michigan's Betsy DeVos to be the next secretary of education. DeVos, a strong advocate for school vouchers and school choice in her home state, is expected to bring this topic to center stage when she begins her term in Washington in the coming months. Israel Ortega of Forbes Magazine listed five ways that DeVos could become a transformative leader . First, Ortega suggests DeVos could reauthorize the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federally-funded voucher program to support low-income families by providing them with private school options. Second, DeVos could redirect Federal Title 1 dollars to follow low-income students, not schools, thus allowing families to use these funds to cover tuition costs at private schools. Third, Ortega suggests that DeVos could reform the network of schools for Native American students by providing families with education savings accounts to pay tuition at private sc...

My public high school in southern New Hampshire is not unlike many schools in our country that seek to offer a wide-range of college credit-earning opportunities for their students. These schools have come to recognize that providing high school students with an opportunity to experience early college success can positively impact the overall achievement rate of students when they finally get to the college level. For the past two decades or more, the most popular way to provide such opportunities was provided by the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program. In the last several years, for a variety of reasons, AP has come under criticism for limitations it places on students and schools. Two years ago, in an exclusive article for Multibriefs , I asked, will changes to AP courses save them from becoming obsolete ? In that article I discussed some of the limitations and shortcomings of the current AP system, things like the superficial and mechanical traditional AP ex...

In quiet New Hampshire, among the beautiful autumn mountain backdrop and the New England seacoast towns, a silent killer known as opioids are making their way from family to family and from community to community, sending shock waves throughout the state and leaving family and friends to question themselves on why they couldn’t (or didn’t) act sooner to saved the lives of their beloved who are succumbing to addiction at an alarming rate. According to a September 2016 report by the New Hampshire Drug Monitoring Initiative , 2013 to 2015 showed a 128.6% increase in the number of drug-related deaths. It is projected that by the end of 2016, there will be close to 500 drug-related deaths, a number that is over four times what it was in 2012. New Hampshire’s story is not unique as drug-related deaths are rising in many parts of our country. Experts attribute much of the drug use, particularly with teens and young adults, to mental health disorders that are going un-diagnosed, untreat...