Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

  This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . After nine months, the impact that the pandemic is having on our nation’s most isolated and rural communities continues to rise. With rising cases, the pandemic has forced many schools into extended periods of remote programming this holiday season. In rural communities which often already have equity gap challenges to overcome, this simply does not help to make things better.   In this recent Associated Press article , author Cedar Attanasio reports with more detail on this topic. Attanasio highlights students who live in the particularly extreme rural community of Cuba, NM, a village of 800 people on the outskirts of the Navajo Nation who live in a variety of cabins, trailers, campers, and other structures. There, some of the only human connections for families come when the school bus arrives to drop off food, supplies, and assignments. School counselors ride the buses so they can check in with their stud...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . To My Fellow Educational Leaders: I hope you all had the opportunity to celebrate, in some small way, the Thanksgiving holiday this past week. As we enter the season of giving this month, we will all need to make some adjustments and concessions to our “normal” celebration routines during the holiday season as a result of the challenges brought to us by the pandemic. You may have already experienced some of these this past week. Our Thanksgiving gathering was certainly smaller with family. We didn’t travel as far and wide as we would have to visit family and friends. Lastly, our annual Black Friday holiday shopping experience kicked off virtually, with no trips to the stores for my wife Erica and I. Yet, with all the changes, Thanksgiving is still a time for being thankful. This fall, as an educational leader, there is no shortage of things to be thankful about. Here are the top two things that made my list this year, ...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education .   In a recent article , Edutopia’s Stephen Merrill asked a pivotal question that every educator needs to ask themselves right now: “In schools, are we measuring what matters?” Merrill reports out on a recent interview he conducted with educator Angela Duckworth, a champion for the push to include non academic skills and dispositions in assessment, grading, and reporting plans. Duckworth is best known for her 2016 bestselling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance . The book raised questions and concerns from fans and critics on whether or not the concept of grit was a skill that should be measured by schools. According to Merrill, Duckworth had this to say: “Any assessment practice that is ‘narrower, more myopic, and more insensitive to equity’ is headed the wrong way. ‘We want to go in the direction of more holistic, better information and evening the playing field’—so that we can broaden our understanding...

  This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . I try to be an eternal optimist, even when times are tough. I’m the person looking for the silver lining in every bad story. Some days it drives my wife crazy because she tells me I don’t have to find a lesson in every situation, but that is a story for another day. The pandemic has offered all of us a series of lessons, whether we like it or not. I’ve been struggling lately to be the instructional leader that I want to be for my New Hampshire high school staff. They look to me for advice as they navigate the tricky waters of teaching in a pandemic, and yet I cannot offer them first-hand advice from experience, because I’ve never been in this situation before. The problem is, none of us have. Some days we feel as educators that we are simply making it up as we go along. We never seem to have finalized plans, because we always see ourselves at the mercy of the virus, not knowing what direction it will take in our ...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . It’s the start of what will be another busy week, and you’ve just opened your computer to find a flurry of emails that need your attention. As you scan through them, you can see that some will be quick responses, but some will involve much more than that. The phone rings, and you learn that one of your teachers has a family emergency and will need to take a couple of weeks off. You’ll have to figure out coverage, and fast. Luckily, your budget was due this morning to your Superintendent but you submitted it a week early. Wait, nevermind. One of your emails is from your boss, and she was breaking the bad news to you that the School Board would like you to go back and find another 2% in budget cuts and you’ll need to update them on where the money will come from tomorrow. As you look out your window, the school buses are pulling into the driveway so you decide to make your way to the door to greet them with a smile. Wait, ...

  This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . The pandemic continues to expose weaknesses in various parts of our educational system. This fall, one of the most debated was one that is often forgotten: The state of our 100,000 elementary and secondary public school facilities. America seems to have a love-hate relationship with its school facilities. They are costly to replace, yet when they are in disrepair, they can be expensive to maintain. For many communities however, they are one of, if not the most heavily used community resources. America’s 50 million children and 6 million educators spend between 30 and 40 hours each week in these spaces, and a school’s core common areas such as gyms, libraries, cafeterias, and auditoriums are used by the community for many evening and weekend events. Public schools account for nearly 7.5 billion square feet of interior space, which equates to almost half the area of all commercial office space in the nation. Each sum...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . I’ll admit it, as a school administrator the pandemic has given me some new vocabulary to incorporate into my daily professional life. First it was social distancing and personal protective equipment (PPE). Then we added contact tracing and mask debates. Now, a new concept has emerged this fall: Microschooling or pandemic pods. Pods are popping up all over the country as families try to cope with fluid school models while maintaining their ability to work and/or keep their kids safe if they do not feel comfortable with the school’s plan. But, are these pods a band aid fix to the challenges the pandemic has presented to schools, or might they be the wave of the future? In t his July 2020 New York Times article , Melinda Moyer was one of the first to report on this new trend. Moyer wrote, “parents around the country have started organizing ‘pandemic pods,’ or home schooling pods, for the fall, in which groups of three to...

  This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . With the uncertainty of the pandemic for months to come, it is apparent that schools will find themselves on a perpetual hiring cycle to keep positions in classrooms and other programs filled, including both regular and substitute positions. What should a principal look for in a new hire? What should new hires expect from a school in this “new normal?” Here are some questions a school leader should consider when making hiring decisions for their school.   ●       Does this candidate believe in the school’s mission, vision, values, and goals?   From as early as the job posting itself, the school should make it very clear what its mission, vision, values, and goals are, and how a potential new hire is expected to uphold and contribute to the school’s philosophy. For example, if a school believes in “learning for all,” then it should be apparent that the new hire shares this ...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . Be honest with yourself. How many of you remember how to factor a polynomial (math teachers, you are exempt from answering this question). How many of you have found a use for this skill in the real world, just like your teacher promised you that you would when you were back in high school? Am I being a little snarky right now? Perhaps. But as a former high school math teacher myself, I’m worried that the profession is doing a disservice to millions of students who are not making the deep connections with math in the same way that they do with other content areas, and our nation’s math assessment scores only serve to support that statement. What are we doing wrong, and what can we do to fix it? This is a question many of us in the field have been asking for years. There must be a better way. This article is not a knock on my fellow math teachers. In fact, I know many who would like to see a complete overhaul in how and...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . When they write the history books a generation from now, 2020 may actually get its own chapter. We are not quite two thirds of the way through this year and it is already proving to be one that has thrown us, as school leaders, more curveballs than we can count. While some may choose to only focus on the negative, I’d like to think that our experiences have given us clarity in our mission and our purpose as educators and as learning communities. As corny as this may sound, I’d firmly believe this entire experience has brought about a new level of 20/20 vision for our future work as school leaders in 2020. The clock is running out (or has run out) on summer vacation, and with it the time we all have had as school leaders to try to make some course corrections, or in some cases, a complete one hundred eighty degree turn, on what schools need to look like during a pandemic. Now more than ever, schools need resilie...

This article was written originally for MultiBriefs Education . In case you hadn’t noticed, our nation is divided, and I’m not talking about politics here. I am talking about some of the most fundamental ideals that our country was founded on: That ALL were created equal. As debates surge around the nation on how we as a society can finally put an end to racism, we need to be mindful that many of our children are set to return to their schools (in some capacity) this fall and need our guidance as adults to help them make sense of their world and this very important issue that we are all facing. In this recent Ed Week Teacher article, educator Malcolm Gillard shared the emotions he felt in the days and weeks following the loss of George Floyd. He wrote, “I imagined Floyd as a young child—no different from a child I teach—crying out for help.” Gillard raised these three questions that he, as a black male teacher, thinks about each time he sees an act such as this: How do ...