September 24, 2013

Local News

The News Journal
Too much pressure on students?
More schools are giving parents almost instant access to their students’ grades and assignments online, allowing them to put their students’ classwork under daily scrutiny. But teachers and child psychology experts say parents should try to keep a balance between getting involved and becoming “helicopter parents” who control their kids’ academic lives so closely that they don’t develop independence. “Teacher websites and online grade reports can be wonderful tools to help parents be engaged with their child’s school,” said Jennifer Shroff Pendley, chief of the division of psychology at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. “However, these same tools can lead to parental over involvement or helicoptering.”

Town Square Delaware
Walking the halls
An opinion by Laurisa Schutt
This school year will be my second as executive director of Teach For America in our state and my fourteenth as a mother, volunteer and observer of the education landscape in Delaware. I’m excited to have this forum to share what I experience, and to bring you guest posts from teachers in their words. While I’m relatively new to leading TFA, I’m not at all new to obsessing about how our state is preparing kids for their futures.

Smyrna-Clayton Sun Times
Q&A with an educator: Smyrna Elementary Associate Principal Katie Wood
Katie Wood has been a part of the Smyrna School District for quite some time now. Having spent time as both a teacher and an instructional technology specialist, she jumped at the chance to be an associate principal when a position opened up this summer. Wood recently took a few minutes to talk with the Sun-Times about why she applied for the position at Smyrna Elementary and what she enjoys about working in education.

National News

NPR
In push for ‘Common’ standards, many parents left uneducated
Cynthia Clay has been a teacher and administrator in Middletown, Del., for 31 years. “I have seen it all, because we have had things come and go in education,” she says. But nothing, she says, has a greater potential to transform public education than the Common Core Standards. She says teachers at her school, Silver Lake Elementary, have embraced them. “In fact, some of our veteran teachers have said, ‘[Common Core] has given me more direction than what we’ve had in the past,’ ” Clay says. Two years after Delaware aligned its state tests to the Common Core, Clay says her students are doing just fine. “They are meeting the standards — that’s what we’re seeing. And in our state assessments, we’re seeing that happen as well,” she says.

Education Week
Florida Gov. Rick Scott: State will curtail role in Common-Core testing consortium
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has told U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that state will curtail its role in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two multistate consortia developing assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

Iowa district puts twist on four-day week
As more districts adopt four-day weeks to cope with budget crunches, one rural Iowa district says it is embracing the practice for a different reason: to squeeze more time out of the school calendar for student enrichment and teachers’ professional development. Starting this school year, students in the 550-student WACO community school district will attend school Monday through Thursday, spending an hour longer in class each day so that no classes will need to be held on Fridays.

St. Paul Pioneer Press
Minnesota’s teacher evaluation system begins first test run
Seventeen Minnesota districts are piloting a new teacher-evaluation system, which ties educators’ scores to classroom work, student achievement, and surveys designed to measure student engagement in classroom lessons. When evaluations become mandatory next year, districts can create their own system or use all or part of one developed by state leaders. One debate that’s sure to continue next legislative session is how to pay for the new system.

The New York Times
An education in equality
An op-doc by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson
When our son Idris was 4 years old, he was accepted to the Dalton School, a prestigious private school in Manhattan. Idris would become one of only a few black boys in a kindergarten class of about 90 students, where tuition rivaled that of private colleges. We decided to document this new world, following Idris over 13 years through graduation. We sought to protect Idris from the African-American male achievement gap in education, where boys like him, regardless of their socioeconomic status, are confronted with experiences that affect their academic performance, as compared to their white counterparts.