December 4, 2015

Delaware News

Office of the Governor
Press Release
Funding announced to expand China study abroad program
In a continuing effort to ensure Delaware students have the best opportunities to learn a second language, Governor Markell today announced the expansion of a China summer abroad program for high school students studying Mandarin.

Cape Gazette
Juniors to take revamped SAT
Giving juniors the state-subsidized SAT as Delaware’s federally mandated test makes more sense than using the test administered now, says the Cape Henlopen school board president. Delaware pays for every junior in public high school to take the SAT. But juniors also are given a state-mandated test, most recently the Smarter Balanced test, which students took for the first time in the spring.

The News Journal
Rare consensus in Delaware over federal education reform
There’s not been a topic in Delaware more polarizing than education, but on Thursday, a day after lawmakers in Congress voted on sweeping reforms to No Child Left Behind, nearly every stakeholder said the same thing: It’s about time.

NewsWorks
Delaware to grow Chinese study abroad program
Delaware will send up to 30 high school students to China each of the next two summers, thanks to money from a Chinese business with local connections. Wanxiang, China’s largest auto parts manufacturer, pledged $675,000 to fund the study abroad program through 2017. This past summer, Wanxiang paid for 20 high school students to spend four weeks at the company’s facility in Hangzhou, China. Thursday’s announcement deepens the company’s commitment.

Technical.ly Delaware
This Wilmington school built a makerspace for 3rd graders
Popsicle sticks, masking tape, rulers, straws and plastic spoons. That’s all a dozen Tatnall School third- and fourth-graders needed last month to craft catapults as part of a new initiative to draw out critical thinking and inventive flair from younger students. Last summer, Tatnall librarian Heather Brooks and technology teacher Collen Hoban were inspired by the increasingly popular maker movement. This fall, they transformed a reading room into the Wilmington private school’s “Tinker Lab.” It’s now full of books about inventions, cabinets stocked with odds and ends, and tables for, of course, tinkering.

National News

NJ Spotlight
Task force’s report on special-education reforms calls for changes
More than two years after its creation, a state task force looking into special-education funding and services in New Jersey has finally issued its report to the Legislature with more than two dozen recommendations, some sweeping and some technical. Maybe the most significant recommendation made by the 17-member panel of educators, special-needs advocates and others is that lawmakers significantly rewrite the state’s funding law to better distribute special-education aid to school districts.

NPR
To measure what tests can’t, some schools turn to surveys
Last year, Susan Avey, the principal of Bogle Junior High School in Chandler, Ariz., had a heart-to-heart with one of her new teachers about how he was relating to students. In a previous year, this might have been a conversation based on subjective impressions. The teacher might have gotten defensive. But this year, Avey had a new tool up her sleeve: a survey of her students.

The Atlantic
The limitations of teaching ‘grit’ in the classroom
The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her 4-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him.

The Notebook
Blog by Greg Windle
See feedback on city schools with District’s latest survey results
The School District of Philadelphia has launched a new website to display the results of a survey offered to parents, students, teachers, and principals at every District and charter school. The survey was designed to measure and publicize stakeholder feedback, which recent research has found helps provide a more complete evaluation of a school – as opposed to relying solely on standardized test scores.

The Hechinger Report
Proposed education bill clears U.S. House; would give states more power, feds less
This week’s U.S. House passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, makes it clear: If you want to see education policy in the next few years, look to state capitols, not Washington, D.C. The current version of the law, the No Child Left Behind Act, created a federal system of testing and accountability, and many educators and policy makers contended that that law was too constraining and created some harmful side-effects.

The Washington Post
Charter schools appealing to more diverse families as D.C. gentrifies
Three decades after cities across the country dismantled mandatory busing programs designed to desegregate public schools, Washington Latin Public Charter School dispatches buses around the city to neighborhoods with public housing and others with million-dollar homes. Charter schools, which enroll students through a citywide lottery, have the potential to create schools that are far more diverse than traditional neighborhood schools, which, by virtue of their attendance boundaries, sort families by race and class.