December 31, 2012
Local News
New monthly e-publication by Office of Early Learning
The Office of Early Learning has launched a monthly, new e-publication to support the early learning initiative. See the December 2012 newsletter here.
The News Journal
Survey will allow teachers to speak up
Delaware public school educators have a new way to make their voices heard with a program starting next month that allows them to give feedback anonymously on conditions at their schools. Information from an online survey called Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning Delaware will be shared with the public for every school where at least half the educators respond to the survey. State officials say they plan to use the data to make more informed policy and funding decisions.
Schools picked right time to withdraw apps
An editorial
It hurts the charter movement when there are weak branches of these schools. This might not have been the laudable conclusion that the backers of three new charters reached when they withdrew their applications on Friday to open their doors in the coming year. But it is the praiseworthy result.
National News
Los Angeles Times
Contested UTLA panel elections signal internal fissures
The recent elections, concluded this month, were the most contested in years, by far. Of 32 election districts, 22 featured contested bids for seats that typically could be had for the asking through a self-nomination process. In all, 396 candidates vied for 209 positions, with 100 won by teachers not in the current House. The ideology of the new delegates is varied, and still evolving.
Education Week
Fiscal cliff: Schools brace for automatic cuts to education in 2013
The automatic spending cuts that are set to hit just about every federal program, including most in the U.S. Department of Education, could go through, at least temporarily. For K-12 programs and Head Start, that would mean an across-the-board cut of 8.2 percent.
Literature and nonfiction: Common Core advocates strike back
As we’ve told you, a particular slice of the common standards in English/language arts has become pretty flammable lately: the rise of nonfiction reading. Until recently, the closest we’d come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards’ co-authors, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature “is not being left by the wayside.”
Related Topics: Common Core, Data Systems, Grants, Teacher Effectiveness