August 11, 2017

Delaware News

Delaware Public Media
School districts working to reach more kids in summer food program
Many of the over 180 sites providing food to low-income kids across the state this summer will close their doors Friday – weeks before school resumes. But Colonial School District’s Nutrition Services Manager Tammy Roop says they’ve been able to keep some of their sites open through next week. That includes Eisenberg Elementary, where UD students have been teaching kids about nutrition and exercise. It’s part of Colonial’s ongoing effort to engage more kids in the fourth year of its summer food program, funded by the USDA.

Rodel Blog
Three things to know about Delaware state tests
Blog post by Jeremy Hidalgo, policy fellow, and Shyanne Miller, policy associate at the Rodel Foundation of Delaware
It is that time of year again—the release of Smarter Assessment and SAT results. The Delaware Department of Education officially released data in late July. While reactions were mixed (see the official release from DDOE, as well as The News Journal’s reaction), we tried to look behind the numbers to shed a bit more light on the results.

UDaily
National assessments show UD students are ready to teach
For education majors to become licensed, certified teachers, many states require them to pass a national performance assessment — either the edTPA, administered through Pearson, or the Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers (PPAT) offered by the Educational Testing Service. In 2016, the State of Delaware joined these ranks, requiring teacher preparation candidates to pass a national performance assessment in order to qualify for Institutional Recommendation.

National News

Politico
DeVos closes civil rights complaints at faster clip than predecessor
Betsy DeVos’ Education Department has closed more than 1,500 civil rights complaints at the nation’s schools — including dismissing more than 900 outright — in the two months since her acting civil rights chief took steps to reduce a massive backlog. The June directive from acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candice Jackson told the department’s investigators to narrow their focus to the merits of a particular claim, rather than probing systemic issues, as they had done during the Obama administration.

NM Political Report
Education plan could result in closure, takeover of some schools
Many New Mexico children have either just started their school year or are preparing to start soon. This month students will prepare for school, new books, new teachers, and their respective dirty looks. The state Public Education Department (PED) rates schools with an A-F grading system to identify, which need ones need improvement—and schools with persistently low grades could experience major overhauls.

The Grunion
School district program offers youngsters an educational head start
“I think it’s one of the best Head Start Programs in the area,” Dr. Claudia Sosa-Valderrama, director of Long Beach Unified School District’s (LBUSD) Head Start and Early Head Start programs, said. “I feel certain that we are making a difference in the community.” Enrollment has begun for this fall’s classes at multiple locations across the city. The Head Start program — established in 1965 — is a national, comprehensive curriculum providing impoverished children with an accessible pre-school education.

The New York Times
A new kind of classroom: No grades, no failing, no hurry
Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile. “Let’s see,” he said one morning this spring. “I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical and real-world problems using a coordinate plane. I still need to get better at dividing multiple-digit numbers, which means I should probably practice that more.”

The Seattle Times
Seattle-area education officials question adequacy, equity of state’s new school-funding plan
It took the Washington Legislature less than 36 hours in late June to unveil and approve a sweeping overhaul of public education as part of a last-minute budget deal to avert a government shutdown. It’s taken much more than 36 hours — 36 days, in fact, as of Friday — for local school-district officials to figure out how that budget will affect their districts.