Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Last month, Education Week released the first of what will be three reports entitled, Quality Counts 2018: A Report Card for States and the Nation on K-12 Education . Now in its 22nd publication, the publication “aims to illuminate what the high-performing states did well, how low-performers are approaching improvement, and lessons for boosting the quality of K-12 education overall.” For the report, states were graded based on these two indicators, which are spelled out in more detail here : CHANCE FOR SUCCESS: The report looked at factors from early foundations to school years to adult outcomes. These included things like  family income, parent education, parental employment, and linguistic integration, preschool and kindergarten enrollment, elementary reading achievement (4th grade NAEP test), middle school math achievement (8th grade NAEP test), high school graduation rate, post-secondary enrollment and completion statistics for adults ages 18-24, adult education attai...

As a school principal, one of the most difficult and often frustrating tasks I have to perform is that of working with students who have high rates of absenteeism. Students miss school for all sorts of reasons, with many of those are beyond their control to overcome without some sort of intervention or assistance from someone, either the school or another adult. In my New Hampshire community, the single biggest reason that keeps students with high rates of absenteeism from attending school can be attributed to anxiety and depression. Over the last decade, I have noticed a sharp rise in cases of anxiety of depression. I have a feeling I am not the only school principal who feels this way. In a recent New York Times Magazine article , writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis asks the question, Why are more American teenagers than ever suffering from severe anxiety? Throughout the article, Denizet-Lewis profiled the story of Jake, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student who in 2015...

Author's Note: This article was written for the National Association for Secondary School Principals. The link to the original article can be found here . As school principals, most of us are measured by how many of our students “meet the standard” for getting to the next level, and therefore, we often focus first on making sure that failing students don’t fall too far behind. But what if this is the wrong metric and the wrong mentality? The fact is, the way we measure educational achievement today puts too much emphasis on staying above the bare minimum, rather than aiming as high as possible. And I’m not just talking about helping the most gifted students do even better. Too many of our students at all levels have figured out how to be “successful” without mastering all of the skills they actually need. If we are to truly advance learning in our schools, something needs to change, and it needs to change fast. Consider Kasey, a typical 11th grade student. Kasey has a stable...

Today I start my seventeenth year as a public school educator, my twelfth as a high school administrator. For many, the new year signals a rebirth. It is an opportunity to start fresh with a new idea, a new habit, or a renewed commitment to something designed to promote improvement. As I sit at my desk this morning, I feel inspired to share my new year’s resolutions in hopes that they may inspire you to start 2018 off right too! ●         I vow to promote opportunities for my staff and me to spend more time visiting classrooms. Classrooms visits, both formal or informal, are beneficial to both the host as well as the guest. I know as a principal it is important for me to get into classrooms as much as possible to help me understand the current reality of my school, but it is equally as important for teachers to go through the process. There are formal ways to do this, such as the instructional round model promoted by ASCD . Bob Marzano exp...