July 22, 2016
Delaware News
Department of Education
2016 state test results show progress across the board in English language arts, mathematics
Delaware students across the board are performing better in mathematics and English language arts, according to preliminary 2016 state test results for grades 3 to 8 released today. The gains are in almost every grade and subject and across almost every student demographic, including students with disabilities, English learners, students from low-income families and those of most racial and ethnic subgroups.
The News Journal
Delaware students show slight gains in statewide tests
Delaware students performed better on the state’s new, controversial standardized test than they did last year, but still only about half are proficient in the two subjects tested – English and math. This was the second year the Smarter Balanced Assessment was given to students in third through eighth grades, so it’s the first chance to see how schools are adjusting to the test that is aligned with the tougher Common Core standards, the nationwide academic program that aims to raise the bar for American students.
National News
Chalkbeat
Thirty high schools with low college-going rates will get extra counselors under state’s newest Drive to 55 initiative
A new resource to get students to college is coming to high schools across Tennessee — or at least about 6 percent of them. Gov. Bill Haslam announced on Thursday a program to provide college counselors to 30 public high schools whose students attend college at a rate lower than the state average. The initiative, called Advise TN, is the latest project of the state’s Drive to 55 campaign.
Education Week
Digital device choices could impact common-core test results, studies finding
Some test questions are likely harder to answer on tablets than on laptop and desktop computers, presenting states and districts with a new challenge as they move to widespread online assessments. Analyses by test providers and other organizations have pointed to evidence of small but significant “device effects” for tests administered in some grades and subjects and on certain types of assessment items.
NPR
From Mozart to Mr. Rogers: Literacy, music and the brain
Welcome to our sand box. For months now, the NPR Ed Team has been playing with what we like to call “long listen” ideas — worthy stories that we can’t tell in three or four minutes. Some ideas don’t hold up. The ones that do make it here, including this little adventure to a one-room schoolhouse in the Colombian Andes and this strange tale of two men, separated by an ocean and united by a stolen laptop.
The Atlantic
Should students learn about Black Lives Matter in school?
If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years. Despite the historical implications of that movement, bureaucratic timelines all but quash any possibility that students might learn about today’s events from an actual history textbook in the near future.
The New York Times
Public Schools? To Kansas conservatives, they’re ‘government schools’
Erica Massman, a moderate Kansas Republican, refers to the building where her daughter attends fourth grade as a public school. Ms. Massman’s mother, whose politics tilt further to the right, calls it something else: a government school. “My mother, who is a Tea Party person, started saying ‘government schools’ all the time,” said Ms. Massman, recalling when she first heard the phrase around 2010. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’”