February 25, 2013

Local News

The News Journal
Wallace new executive director at Vision Network
The Vision Network of Delaware, a Wilmington nonprofit, will have a new executive director at the helm Monday. Dana Diesel Wallace replaces Mark Murphy, who left to become the state Secretary of Education. She was most recently working at a North Carolina organization that advocated a public­-private education innovation.

Eighth-graders’ STEM lessons roar to life
In conjunction with the Delaware section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Alliant Techsystems Inc., or ATK, welcomed the eighth-graders as part of Thursday’s national Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Their guidance counselor, Charles Woodall, said the girls are top of their class in math and science at Bohemia Manor Middle School in Chesapeake City, Md., and were invited on the day trip to see just what engineers in the field actually do.

Scores to reflect back on colleges
Gov. Jack Markell’s administration will move forward with a plan to measure how well colleges prepare new teachers for the classroom, despite objections from all of Delaware’s teacher preparation programs. The new system would rate the quality of each college by looking at the standardized test scores of students taught by its recent graduates. The assessment process will be used this fall, and the results of how each college performed will be available to the public on the state Department of Education’s website.

National News

The New York Times
Better charter schools in New York City
An editorial
For the second time in three years, a rigorous study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes shows that the typical New York City charter school student learns more in a year in reading and math than his or her peers in their neighborhood district schools. The difference, over a typical year, amounts to about a month’s more learning in reading — and a whopping five months’ more learning in math.  That is good news, especially given the fact that about three-quarters of the city’s charter school children come from poor families. But a mixed picture emerged when the Stanford researchers measured charter schools on students’ learning growth (year-to-year improvement) as well as their overall achievement, as compared with the city as whole.

Arizona Republic
Phoenix schools take innovative steps to ease funding crunch
The school day ended several hours ago, and Quintin Boyce stands anxiously outside Bioscience High School’s cafeteria in his shirt and tie.  Boyce, who oversees recruitment at the downtown Phoenix school, watches potential students file into a recruitment fair. Some of the students in the school’s robotics program mingle with eighth-graders who have shown up.   Boyce puts on his suit jacket, grabs a microphone and prepares to make his pitch: Bioscience offers small classes and exposure to city, county and state governments. It will prepare students for college and “the real world.” Every student will have an internship his or her senior year.  One hundred fifty people show up to hear Boyce talk about downtown Phoenix’s only non-charter public school.

The Washington Post
Virginia lawmakers seek to simplify school ratings with A to F grades
To simplify an ever-growing list of school rankings, Virginia lawmakers have approved a new way to rate the state’s schools, and it’s borrowed straight from teachers’ grade books: A to F letter grades.  Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) championed the A to F scale as a simple way to bolster accountability.   “When children come home with report cards, parents can clearly see how well they are doing and where they are in need of improvement,” McDonnell said in a statement. “This legislation brings that same idea to school performance.”

Education Week
5 largest states rival or lag nation on NAEP results
The nation’s largest states matched or fell below recent nationwide averages on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, math, and science, a new study says. The first-time examination of NAEP scores from 2009 and 2011 for students in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas reveals that Texas alone beat the national average more than once in any of the three subjects.

The Denver Post
Colorado high schoolers who are enrolled in college classes up 15 percent
About 19% of Colorado high schoolers participated in dual enrollment programs— up by more than 15% from a year earlier, according to the state’s annual report. Overall, about 85% of dual-enrollment students go on to college, with analyses showing the participants are likely to have higher grade-point averages and to stay in school beyond their freshman year.

Related Topics: Governor Markell, Higher Education, NAEP, STEM, Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Evaluation, Teacher Preparation, Vision Network