August 12, 2014

Local News

WDDE
State looking for help with College Application Month
Delaware’s third annual College Application Month starts in October, and the state is looking for volunteers to help. All First State district and charter high schools will hold events in October and November designed to allow students to finish college apps during school hours. Last year 20 public high schools across the state participated with about 2,750 students applying to college.

National News

Education Week
Multigenerational program aims to break poverty cycle
New efforts are looking to help both children and their parents get a leg up and a better education.

Kansas teachers’ union challenges anti-tenure law
The largest teachers’ union in Kansas filed a lawsuit Monday against a new state law that ended guaranteed tenure for public school teachers, arguing that legislators violated the state constitution by folding the new policy into a larger education funding measure.

Diversity on the rise among TFA recruits
Fully half of Teach For America’s 5,300 crop of new recruits identify as people of color, the organization announced today. The focus on diversity is a deliberate move by the organization, which changed some of its recruiting techniques in order to have a more diverse pool of applicants. According to its figures, 47 percent of the new teaching corps received Pell Grants, which are meant for low-income college students; 33 percent are actually coming from graduate school or with professional experience, and 22 percent identify as African-American.

Group to launch free online reviews of Common-Core materials
A new organization is wading into the (very choppy) waters of judging whether major textbooks and other classroom materials are aligned to the common core. The long-rumored edreports.org now has an executive director—Eric Hirsch, formerly the chief external affairs officer at the New Teacher Center—as well as a mission statement and a basic up-and-running website. The nonprofit is billing itself as “a ‘Consumer Reports’ for school materials.” But unlike Consumer Reports, it will offer its services for free.

New York Times
Is a hard life inherited?
An op-ed by Nicholas Kristof
One delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence. Yet many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is a meanspiritedness in the political world or, at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling — partly explaining the hostility to state expansion of Medicaid, to long-term unemployment benefits, or to raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.

Chicago Tribune
Study shows many teachers not credentialed in their subjects
Illinois school districts have employed hundreds of educators to teach everything from science to special education even though they lacked proper credentials in those subjects, a Tribune investigation has found. The assignment of teachers not properly trained and credentialed to teach a specific course — a practice that has come under fire nationwide — is facilitated by loopholes in state laws and rules as well as by district hiring practices. It has occurred even when applicants with the required qualifications were available, the newspaper found.