June 19, 2015

Delaware News

NewsWorks
Delaware places four charters on probation, closes none
Three Delaware charters suffering enrollment woes and a fourth facing financial trouble will be placed on probation, but will not close. That decision was made Thursday by the State Board of Education, and follows recommendations made by the state’s Charter School Accountability Committee earlier this month.

The News Journal
Charter schools get probation, will stay open
Two new charter schools — Freire Charter School and Delaware Design Lab High School — will open this fall as scheduled. Two already-open charters — Academy of Dover and Prestige Academy — will stay open, assuming they meet the terms of their probation.

Delaware State News
Capital taps Christina principal for superintendent job
The Capital School District Board of Education has offered the position of superintendent to Dr. Dan Shelton.

Huffington Post
Harsh words of experience
Blog by Karin Chenoweth
“Even a great school can still have a group of students not achieving. And if you don’t make them count, no one will care about them.” Those harsh words were said by long-time educator Sharon Brittingham, who has seen how indifferent some in schools can be to the needs of some students. For the past few years she has been coaching principals throughout Delaware, but her formative experience was as principal of Frankford Elementary School in rural Delaware. “I still say the partnership between Indian River School District and the federal Office of Civil Rights, together with NCLB, led to Indian River’s current success,” Brittingham said. “The district could no longer ignore the children of color, the low-income and special needs students.”

National News

The Wall Street Journal
The watchdogs of college education rarely bite
Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults. Last year alone, the federal government sent $16 billion in aid to students at four-year colleges that graduated less than one-third of their students within six years, according to an analysis of the latest available federal data.

The New York Times
Tough tests for teachers, with question of bias
As states have introduced more-difficult teacher-licensing exams, passing rates have fallen. But minority candidates have been doing especially poorly, jeopardizing a long-held goal of diversifying the teaching force to more closely resemble the country’s student body.

Cleveland.com
Testing hours and future of PARCC still unclear in Senate’s testing changes
The Ohio Senate’s proposed fixes for the state’s student testing issues agree with the House on a few key points like shortening tests and giving a “safe harbor” from negative consequences of bad scores.

NPR
Arkansas students to learn engineering skills in kindergarten
New science standards for Arkansas students for the first time include engineering courses beginning in kindergarten. High school students will also start learning earth science statewide.

Chronicle of Higher Education
After years lambasting teacher-ed programs, Art Levine creates one
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, headed by Arthur Levine, is creating its own graduate school for teacher education in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offering master’s degrees through a competency-based program.