As many of you prepare yourself, your children, or your grandchildren to take the PSAT this week, you are taking a big step toward a college education: a step toward building skills that may be even more essential in the coming years.  According to a report released earlier this year, the US is on a course to under-produce postsecondary graduates by 3 million by 2018.  In a fast-moving and quickly evolving high-tech economy, this should come as no surprise.

Today, it is more important than ever for students to build additional skills beyond what is taught in high school.  14.4 million newly created jobs are predicted to emerge by 2018.  Although we do not yet know what these future jobs will look like, we can speculate a few things about them.  Information and communication technologies likely will be a key aspect of these yet-to-be-created jobs. New technologies are also predicted to become a part of many current jobs that will open up in the coming years due to the rapid retirement of the Baby Boomer generation.  The skills required for these jobs will require 16 percent more of the work force to have at least a college education.

But before we can even think of graduating with a college degree, we must first be prepared to enter into the challenging world of college academics.  But how prepared for college are students today?  Although the current presidential administration has a goal to have all students ready for college or career by 2020, only 24 percent of current students are college- and career-ready. 

Now, Delaware has begun to take steps to resolve this gap.  New course requirements and Common Core standards are great steps forward, but the work is not done.  We have to lower our dropout rate and get students enrolled in a full and challenging courseload rich in STEM subjects.  We have to reduce and eliminate the achievement gaps so that students of all backgrounds can get the valuable skills they will need to succeed in the new economy.  We must ensure our students have all the support they need to follow their dreams

The time to act is now.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that we have been having some troubles with the comments feature of our blog.  We have noticed that comments have not been showing up and we are working on this issue now.  Comments will be functional soon.

Thanks for reading!

Last month, Delaware Senate Bill #261 was introduced by Senator Dave Sokola and co-sponsored by Representative Terry Schooley. It has since been passed in the senate and will soon be voted on in the house. This bill would require that schools seek signatures from each parent at the beginning of each school year on a parent/school to be prepared by the Department of Education and parent organizations.

This compact would both identify the responsibilities of parents as well as the commitment of the public schools to actively collaborate in promoting student success. So what will this agreement look like and how can Delaware learn from national best practice?

One example Delaware can learn from is New York City’s Parents Bill of Rights which lays out the families’ rights to:

• Free, safe, and supportive education,
• Access to information
• Parents to be involved in school matters
• File complaints.

And parents’ have responsibilities to

• Support their student’s education
• Take part in the community and local school district.

Beyond the Bake Sale—a defining book on parent engagement–outlines a three-part process to engaging parents, which should be considered in this effort:

1. Welcoming parents to the school
2. Honoring their participation, and
3. Connecting parents through a focus on the children and their learning.

The compact should reflect these principles by not only expressing that parents have rights, but also encouraging parents to be a part of a partnership. This agreement must not turn into a burden for the schools. Rather, it should be a way for schools to reach out to the families of the students they impact to encourage collaboration between the two parties and the community as a whole. This should be just one part of a greater strategy to build a partnership school that engages, encourages, and empowers parents to be involved in their students’ education.

The importance the duality that exists in education cannot be overstated: the school has responsibilities to the people whom it is tasked with educating for the sake of the community and families have the responsibility of seeing to it that their student is ready and mentally and physically equipped to learn. In times of economic struggle such as the present, the greatest long term strategy for economic revitalization of our communities is empowering our children to learn and to grow socially. This can only be done when schools and families work together.

Last month, a study by Ball State University reported that funding for our nation’s charter schools is significantly lower than funding for traditional public schools. Delaware is one of the worst offenders of this funding gap with a difference of $3,665 per pupil. This is in comparison with the national average of a $2,247 difference per pupil. In the Wilmington area, the difference is larger still with a funding gap at a whopping $4,604 per student. This finding echoes from the 2008 LEAD Committee report on funding.

This funding discrepancy is largely the result of a lack of access to capital construction funding for charter schools. In Delaware, our district schools raise money for capital construction costs via property tax referendums but charter schools don’t have this option. Charter schools have access to facilities funding via tax-exempt bonds from the Delaware Economic Development Authority, but this isn’t exactly equal since these need to be paid back with interest.

If we want all of our students to succeed it is imperative that we enact an equitable funding system for all of our schools.

For more Delaware coverage on this report, see this recent article from the Middletown Transcript.