State Summer Leadership Summit welcomes author, Dr. Mario Acosta
Welcome Home, Dr. Mario Acosta!
TALAS is thrilled to welcome back Dr. Mario Acosta, Marzano consultant, author, and esteemed educational leader, to El Paso as our featured guest author at the TALAS State Summer Leadership Summit!
Dr. Acosta brings a wealth of leadership expertise, having served as a campus principal and educational leader in Texas.
He will be presenting two impactful sessions on creating high reliability schools and will also be available for a book signing of his latest work, Five Big Ideas for Leading a High Reliability School.
Bonus! The first 150 registered attendees will receive a complimentary copy of his book!
A native of El Paso and graduate of Cathedral High School, Dr. Acosta’s homecoming is one you won’t want to miss.
3.2.1: On the secret to youth, how to achieve what you want, and the challenge of being yourself
3 Ideas From Me
I.
“The person who experiences the consequences should make the decision.”
II.
“You are as old as the risks you take. In many ways, aging is not the process of growing old, but rather the slow death of becoming overly protective, scared, and worried about losing what you have. Youth is found in the energy of going for it, taking the risk, and trusting that you’ll figure it out along the way.”
Reading comprehension loses out in the classroom
Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t.
Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s relatively good evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read.
Department of Education Changes the Rules for ESSER Reimbursement
The United States Department of Education has announced a change to its policies around Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. In an effort to increase transparency and accountability around federal expenditures, all funds spent on ESSER-approved services must now be paid for by the states in advance and then submitted to ED for reimbursement, the department said in a press release.
Under previous guidelines, states could utilize existing awards without providing proof that the funds were used for authorized purposes, ED pointed out. “The Department is changing the requirements to ensure taxpayer funds are expended responsibly, and will require states to keep the receipts to confirm this.”
Trump Has Made English the Official Language. What That Means for Schools
-12 educators in the United States are still federally required to support English learners’ acquisition of the English language, regardless of any official national language designation.
That’s the main takeaway from researchers and former U.S. Department of Education directors in response to the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 1, which designates English as the official language of the country.
“A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language,” the executive order reads.
Standards Gap: Why Many Students Score Proficient on State Tests But Not on NAEP
One of the most striking features of the troubling results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress is the much lower percentage of students scoring proficient on NAEP than on many states’ own 2024 standardized exams.
By now, you’ve likely seen the results: modest improvements in math, but not enough to get students back to pre-pandemic performance levels; fourth graders fell further behind in reading; a record 34% of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading.