At last Thursday’s State Board of Education meeting, DOE presented updates on Race to the Top Implementation, including planning, assessment and data. Implementation planning is underway at both the state and district levels. Delaware DOE’s partnership with the Education Delivery Institute is yielding “Delivery Plans” that...

In 2008, Gauger-Cobbs Middle School joined the Vision Network to enhance the intensive academic and cultural supports that Principal Dr. Amy Grundy had been putting into place. Under Dr. Grundy’s leadership, Gauger-Cobbs had secured a grant from The Wallace Foundation and the State of Delaware in 2005 that brought a framework of distributed...

The Common Core has demonstrated the power of what a voluntary, state-driven initiative can accomplish:  more efficient use of resources, cross-state comparisons, and students who can compete worldwide. The new frontier is student assessment, led by state-based assessment consortia (SBAC and PARCC) to develop systems and item banks that can...

Kalamazoo, Michigan is not a place you hear of often.  Yet back in 2005, something happened that changed everything for the unassuming town of 80,000: “The Kalamazoo Promise,” an anonymously established and endowed offering to public school graduates of tuition at any Michigan public university or college. Five years later, what...