November 15, 2013
Local News
The News Journal
Red Clay board rejects class size waiver
The Red Clay School Board narrowly rejected last night a request from district administration to waive requirements for maximum class sizes in its earliest grades.
Why Reach needed to close and how we move on
An op-ed by Kendall Massett, Executive Director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network
Delaware charter schools are doing just fine. The highest performing public school in the state is a charter school. The highest performing middle school in the state is a charter school. The highest performing elementary school in the city of Wilmington is a charter school. Student enrollment in Delaware’s charter schools has grown 76.5 percent since 2005 – there are now 21 charter schools statewide serving 11,078 children. Five new schools are slated to open next year.
Reach Academy, segregation and discrimination
An op-ed by Jea Street, New Castle County Councilman and chair of the education committee of the Delaware State Conference of Branches of the NAACP
Reach Academy has been inappropriately and unfairly targeted for closure by the Delaware Department of Education primarily due to its test scores. The NAACP maintains this is fundamentally unfair. There are a host of regular public schools with comparable test scores.
National News
Arizona Republic
State’s high schools huge disparity in college grad rates
Half of the Arizona’s high schools saw 5% or fewer of their graduates from 2006 earn bachelor’s degrees, a new Arizona Board of Regents study finds. And 62% of the college degrees earned by the high-school Class of 2006 went to students from just 40 of the state’s 460 high schools. The report is the first in the state to provide a snapshot of college-completion rates for individual high schools.
Associated Press
Longer school days in store for some in 5 states
More than 9,000 students are attending select, high-poverty schools in Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York that have developed expanded school schedules as part of the TIME Collaborative, run by the National Center on Time & Learning. The organization announced that a second group of schools in those states and Tennessee will join the collaborative.
Education Week
House and Senate preschool bills: A guide to the latest proposal
Under bipartisan legislation introduced by Senate and House education committee leaders, states that want to offer prekindergarten to low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds would get a major assist from the federal government. Prekindergarten programs funded under the bill would have to meet certain quality standards. For instance, they’d have to be full-day and teachers would have to have a bachelor’s degree.
Education pioneers grooms rising corps of K-12 managers
Applications to Education Pioneers, a nonprofit group that brings high-performing leaders—particularly those from outside education—into K-12 administrative internships, are rising steadily, putting the 10-year-old organization in line to follow in the footsteps of other nontraditional talent recruiters such as Teach For America. Despite that recent growth, however, Education Pioneers remains under the radar of many education leadership and management experts and organizations.
Opening school data carries economic value, report contends
The increasingly ubiquitous flow of data across education has caused anxiety among parents and privacy advocates, who fear that information about students will be released or shared with outside entities without permission. Yet a new report, while acknowledging those concerns, focuses on a potential payoff in expanding the openness of data across K-12: robust economic growth.