December 14, 2016

 Delaware News

Coastal Point
IRSD denies allegations in discrimination lawsuit
Accused of racial discrimination at George Washington Carver Academy, the Indian River School district submitted its official response on Dec. 5, denying all claims of intentional wrongdoing at the alternative school. The IRSD was responding to a federal lawsuit filed on Sept. 30 by two IRSD families and the local Coalition for Education Reform, a nonprofit group whose mission is to “assist the school district with matters that affect the educational successes of all minority students and to help eliminate the achievement gap in underachieving students and to address other concerns.”

Delaware 105.9
2016 winners of the Election Year Scholarship Contest announced
The 2016 winners of the Election Year Scholarship Contest were announced today at the Sussex County Council meeting. The council recognized six students, one grand prize recipient and five runners-up, with plaques and scholarship prizes for their winning efforts. Each entrant was asked to predict the total number of votes the winner of the presidential race would receive from Sussex County. Donald Trump, who won the election, collected 62,607 votes from Sussex County.

Delaware Public Media
Bill raising dropout age from 16 to 18 will be back before lawmakers
Delaware is one of only 14 states that allow students to drop out of school without parental permission starting at age 16. But some lawmakers and advocates are trying to change that. A bill will be re-introduced this legislative session to move the legal dropout rate for First State students from 16 to 18 years old. State Representative Debra Heffernan is committed to bringing back a bill she introduced in 2015 to make it happen.

The Milford Beacon
Morris tackles book shortage with James Patterson grant
The Morris Early Childhood Center doesn’t have any books on squirrels. Librarian Diane O’Hara said she was embarrassed when teachers assigned a writing project about the rodents. So she decided to apply for a grant. Her efforts paid off, and Morris is the only Delaware school to receive a grant from author James Patterson, who has written books such as “Kiss the Girls,” and “Along Came a Spider.”

The News Journal
Is school choice the key to improving education?
Opinion by Donald L. Gephardt, professor and Dean Emeritus at Rowan University
At the recent Republican National Convention, when anyone was asked what is the answer to improving K-12 education, the unanimous response was to insure and mandate school choice. If parents were free to choose the schools that their children attend, all of the “problems” in education would go away. Choice would create a buyer’s market where only the good schools would survive and the incompetent ones would close for lack of students.

WDEL
Christina School Board doesn’t rescind district’s settlement with charters
The measure fell on a 4 to 3 vote. Elizabeth Paige, Shirley Saffer and John Young voted for rescinding the proposal while George Evans, Meg Mason, Harrie Ellen Minnehan, and Fred Polaski voted against rescinding the settlement. Young explained his reasoning for the proposal.

National News

Chalkbeat
Education officials present multimillion-dollar wish list, including funding for English learners and new assessments
The New York State Education Department submitted a budgetary wish list for the 2017 legislative session on Monday, including a sizable investment in English learners and support for new graduation options. The largest chunk of funding would go toward developing new native-language exams geared toward students learning English and another would create project-based assessments, which substitute a series of tasks for traditional multiple-choice tests.

Education Week
The brain science behind student trauma
The most remarkable feature of humankind is the flexibility of our brains. This neuroplasticity—or the brain’s ability to adjust its activities in response to new situations—is what has allowed our species to make dramatic changes from generation to generation. Humans have evolved from small hunter-gatherer clans to urban, digitally connected, international communities. The most malleable part of our brain is the neocortex, which can absorb and store more bits of information than the brains of any other species.

NPR
After 50 years, Head Start struggles with uneven quality
For more than 50 years, Head Start has provided free early childhood education and other services to low-income families and their children. But new national research, out today, shows great variation from state to state in how well the program works. The study comes from the National Institute for Early Education Research, and it examined Head Start programs in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.

The Nation
The education of Barack Obama
What does it mean to be progressive on education issues? Eight years ago, when President Obama came into office, this was a hotly contested question. The Democratic Party was split into two camps. On one side were union allies, researchers, and policy-makers who argued that children’s academic performance would only improve with better-trained teachers, smaller class sizes, greater access to early-childhood education, and stronger antipoverty efforts. On the other side was the bipartisan education-reform movement.

The New York Times
It turns out spending more probably does improve education
If you spend more on education, will students do better? Educators, politicians and unions have battled in court over that crucial question for decades, most recently in a sweeping decision this fall in Connecticut, where a judge ordered the state to revamp nearly every facet of its education policies, from graduation requirements to special education, along with its school funding. For many years, research on the relationship between spending and student learning has been surprisingly inconclusive.