August 16, 2013
Local News
Cape Gazette
The high price of educating high-needs students
Taxpayers, school districts, the Department of Education and other state departments quietly spend millions of dollars every year to educate special needs students placed in full-time residential care facilities. For these students – referred to as “high behavior” by school officials who say they cannot be educated in a regular classroom – individual tuitions can rise into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Delaware State News
Capital School District gets strong update on Race to Top
At their meeting Wednesday night, the Capital School District Board of Education received an update on Race to the Top programs in the district. The district met or exceeded its Race to the Top goals in reading and math this year. Over the past year, Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System test scores increased by an average of 18 percent in reading and 12 percent in math, the school offered more family and community engagement options, and 31 students graduated with “Daylight,” a credit recovery program.
National News
New York Times
School standards’ debut is rocky, and critics pounce
The Common Core, a set of standards for kindergarten through high school that has been supported by the Obama administration and many business leaders and state legislatures, is facing growing opposition from both the right and the left even before it has been properly introduced into classrooms.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Hite: Philadelphia schools will open on time
Philadelphia School District officials said Thursday that classes would begin Sept. 9 as scheduled, now that the city has vowed to come up with the $50 million the district needs – even though city leaders remain divided about the source of those funds.
Education Week
Assessment Governing Board defines ‘college prepared’
The governing board for the tests known as “the nation’s report card” has marked its own definition of what makes a student academically prepared for college. The new definitions are based on more than 30 studies, including several comparing the content and predictive value of the federally sponsored NAEP with those of college-placement assessments, such as the SAT, the ACT, and Accuplacer, as well as longitudinal studies in Florida of how students who performed at different levels on NAEP later fared in freshman-level college courses.
Washington Post
Undocumented immigrants have different college costs in Va. and Md.
Tania Herrera graduated from high school in Loudoun County with a 3.2 grade-point average and an admission letter from her dream school: Radford University. Then she hit a roadblock. As an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, Herrera was not eligible for in-state tuition at the Virginia public school. If she lived just a few miles away, in Maryland, Herrera’s path to college might be different. Maryland is one of about a dozen states that passed Dream Act legislation that grants in-state tuition to undocumented students who meet certain qualifications. The two neighboring states highlight growing differences in academic opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants as state lawmakers try to address what has become a burning political issue.
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