April 26, 2016

Delaware

Newark Post
Plant sale helps Christiana High students find their green thumbs
Before she took a plant science class, Anaiyah Huggins couldn’t picture herself working in the garden. “I thought planting was nasty,” the Christiana High School sophomore said. However, teacher Katie Phillips made her roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty. As she and her classmates helped prepare for the school’s annual plant sale, Huggins learned to embrace her green thumb. “It’s fun,” she said Saturday as she worked in the greenhouse during the plant sale.

Rodel Blog
Rodel Teacher Council applications now live!
Step out of your classroom—without leaving it. Expand your network while informing and inspiring decision-makers at all levels. Learn from, and with, your fellow teachers. Applications are now live for the 2016-17 Rodel Teacher Council. Lend your voice and expertise to impact the education conversation in Delaware. This opportunity is open to any current Delaware public school teacher, including special educators, early learning teachers, and teachers in all content areas.

National

Education Week
Vergara reversal spotlights ongoing equity concerns
Despite the thousands of dollars spent on glossy PR, both pro and con, over the Vergara v. California case, last week’s decision by a state appeals court to uphold teacher job protections hinged on a far less flashy factor: the arcana of California constitutional law. From the beginning, both sides in the polarizing case acknowledged that it would probably end up before the state’s Supreme Court, and those gears are already cranking, with the plaintiffs planning to seek review there.

Detroit Free Press
Who decides whether third-graders should be held back?
As Michigan lawmakers try to iron out differences over who decides whether struggling third-grade readers should be held back, the answer may lie, in part, in Oklahoma. That state has a strict law requiring third-graders who aren’t reading at grade level to repeat the grade. But the law also allows schools to have a team that includes the child’s parents, teachers and a reading specialist evaluate whether the student should receive a probationary promotion to the fourth grade — a decision that would have to be approved by the principal or superintendent.

NewsOK
Program helps education students stay in school … and in Oklahoma
Alissa Lloyd’s dream of becoming a teacher was abruptly halted when, at age 21, she discovered she had cancer. Her battle with the disease forced her to drop out of college and drained her finances. But thanks to a special program for promising teachers at the University of Oklahoma, she is back on track pursuing a lifetime of helping children. “It was the week my hair started to fall out that I knew I would never be the same,” said Lloyd, who underwent months of chemotherapy.

NPR
Kentucky’s unprecedented success in school funding is on the line
The way Daphne Patton remembers it, it was more money than she’d ever seen. It was 1990, and the Kentucky Supreme Court had declared the state’s school funding system unconstitutional. Within a year, a lot more money started flowing to the poorest school districts, a 50 to 60 percent increase in their budgets. Patton, an elementary school teacher from Wolfe County in eastern Kentucky, says schools had an abundance of resources, “everything we needed.”

The Hechinger Report
Bilingual battle brewing in California…again
Last spring, Derrick Fields, 9, sat in his social studies classroom at Sherman Elementary School, learning about the creation of the telegraph. The machine was invented so that “someone can connect to someone who is far away,” he said. This was pretty normal stuff for a fourth grade history lesson, except for one thing: The entire lesson — from the textbooks to the teacher’s instructions to the students’ short essays — was in Spanish.