April 26, 2017

Delaware News

Delaware 105.9
Gov. Carney to host tele-town hall with Sec. of Education Dr. Susan Bunting Thursday night
Governor John Carney is inviting Delaware educators, parents and Delawareans across the state to join him for an hour-long Tele-Town Hall on education and the state budget. Joined by Secretary of Education Susan Bunting, the conversation will allow Governor Carney to answer questions about his proposed budget and Delaware’s investments in education.

Gov. Carney visits North Georgetown Elementary School, proclaims “Teach Children to Save Week”
More than 185 volunteers from the banking and finance sectors will be teaching about 8,200 students in more than 75 public, private and parochial schools. They will be stressing the importance of saving, and starting to save at an early age. “Everybody has something to save for no matter what age they are.

Town Square Delaware
Q&A: Incoming DSEA President Mike Matthews
Last month Mike Matthews was elected president of the Delaware State Education Association (DSEA), the powerful union representing more than 10,000 teachers and school workers. Matthews is an elementary school teacher and ascends to the statewide post after serving as head of the Red Clay Consolidated School District’s employee union since 2013. The DSEA president-elect is also a former TSD contributor, and he granted us his first extensive interview, where he lays out his vision for the role and where he believes education policy should be focused in the First State.

Rodel Blog
The link between career/technical education and student success
Blog by Jenna Bucsak, senior program officer at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware
Just one career and technical education course above the average can boost a student’s odds of graduating high school and enrolling in a two-year college, according to a study by the Fordham Institute. It can also lead to a higher likelihood of college enrollment, employment, and better wages.

Digging Deeper: Why graduation rates don’t tell the whole story
Blog post by Jenna Bucsak, senior program officer at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware
It may be stating the obvious, but a high school diploma is not the sole determinant of student success. Instead, we usually need to examine a student’s entire academic career—from kindergarten through 12th grade—to get a picture of how well prepared they are to pursue their interests after high school. Likewise, disparities in academic achievement can offer insight into why low-income and minority students fall often behind their peers—and expose areas for intervention so all students have the best chance to pursue whichever options they choose after high school.

National News

EdSource
1 in 8 children in California schools have an undocumented parent
Posing significant challenges for educators, about 1 in 8 students in California schools has at least one parent who is undocumented, according to a new brief from the Education Trust-West. Undocumented children as well as U.S. citizen children with undocumented relatives have experienced heightened anxieties for several years as a result of deportation policies begun under President George W. Bush and tightened ones under President Barack Obama.

Education Week
School districts update professional development
In Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine school district, teachers can personalize their own professional learning by earning microcredentials in areas that interest them. In Florida’s Lake County school district, ingenious scheduling models allow teachers to collaborate more often. And on the other side of the country, California’s Long Beach Unified district has developed new methods to collect evidence on the effectiveness of the professional development it offers teachers.

The 74 Million
U.S. News ranks America’s top public high schools — and for the first time, charters dominate top
U.S. News and World Report has released its 2017 rankings of America’s public high schools, and for the first time ever, the majority of the schools in the top 10 are charters. BASIS Scottsdale, BASIS Tucson North, and BASIS Oro Valley — all Arizona public charter schools in the BASIS network — placed one, two, and three atop the 2017 list. Rounding out the top tier are Arizona’s BASIS Peoria and BASIS Chandler schools (ranking #5 and #7 respectively) and California’s Pacific Collegiate Charter (#10).d

The Atlantic
The privilege of school choice
Last year, a contentious zone change in New York City forced well-off parents to decide whether or not to integrate a high-poverty school. The exact-same scenario had played out a half-century earlier during the city’s brief attempt at school desegregation. On November 23, the morning after his home was drawn into a different school zone, Mark Gonsalves slipped out of his office in Midtown Manhattan and rode the subway to the Upper West Side.

The New York Times
In New York City schools, an ever-rising tide of homeless students
The number of New York City public school students living in homeless shelters has increased in each of the last five years, reaching nearly 33,000 in the 2015-16 school year, the city’s Independent Budget Office said in a report on Monday. That is 4,000 more students than at any point during the previous academic year, an increase of 15 percent.