July 28, 2017

Delaware News

Coastal Point
School board wants consistent rules for school choice
Kevin Patterson’s third-grade daughter has found success in the Indian River School District, and he looked forward to sending his son to kindergarten this fall. But, living outside the district, the boy isn’t guaranteed a spot, and the school has recommended that the school board reject his school choice application. After all, the Kindergarten Center is filling up faster than usual, and they haven’t even entered the heavy enrollment period of August.

Department of Education
State assessment results show more students proficient in math and English
More Delaware students are participating in statewide mathematics and English language arts (ELA) assessments, and more students are proficient in these subjects, according to preliminary 2017 state assessment results for grades 3 to 8 and high school. Delaware’s participation rate in the state’s Smarter assessment increased from 98 percent in 2016 to 99 percent this year in both ELA and mathematics.

Delaware Public Media
More First State students college, career ready, according to state test results
Delaware is continuing to make progress in its push to increase math and English proficiency in the state’s K-12 students, but that’s without some setbacks. The Smarter Balanced Assessment results released Thursday show Delaware making steady gains with math scores. 45 percent of the state’s students tested proficient in math this year, which is up one percentage point from last year and four points from 2015 -the first year of the assessment.

The News Journal
Delaware student test scores released; no major gains, losses
State officials said Thursday that not only did more students take state tests this past year, but more were proficient in both English and math. That being said, results were mostly flat, with only about half of all students meeting the proficiency cutoff. Looking at Smarter Balanced Assessments, which are administered in grades 3 through 8, 45 percent of students were proficient in math in 2017, compared with 44 percent in 2016.

Don’t divide Delaware over charter schools
Opinion by Delaware Voices
School’s out for summer, but for some Delaware leaders, that means more time to criticize public charter schools and scapegoat them for problems in Delaware’s education system. In his first week on the job, Delaware’s teachers’ union president Mike Matthews offered the following incendiary commentary on social media: “The whole charter movement and NSA [Neighborhood Schools Act] in Delaware is because certain folks don’t want their kids going to school with the kids of other certain folks. Period.”

Make social and emotional learning a priority
Opinion by Megan Pell, instructional coach at the University of Delaware’s Center for Disability Studies
To hear The News Journal tell it, few schools are exposing students to social and emotional learning, the process students go through to develop skills and habits that can help them positively interact with others and better understand their own emotions. The reality on the ground in schools throughout The First State is quite different, however.

National News

Boston Globe
Senate approves bilingual education measure
The Massachusetts Senate on Thursday unanimously approved a bill that would allow school systems to bring back bilingual education, potentially upending a 15-year-old voter referendum that widely banned school systems from teaching students academic courses in their native language. Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, a Boston Democrat, called the practice of delivering instruction only in English to students with language barriers “a failed experiment.”

PBS
States bristle as DeVos and Department of Education critique their K-12 plans
The back and forth between states and Washington over the Every Student Succeeds Act has become more complicated than many had expected. Although U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took office in February pledging to let states seize control of key education policy decisions under the new federal K-12 law, her department’s responses to states’ ESSA plans have surprised—and in some cases irritated—state leaders and others.

Real Clear Education
Illinois has a rare opportunity to transform education
There is an ongoing battle in America to change the way children, particularly children from low-income families, a disproportionate number of whom are children of color, are able to access schooling. In this continuing saga, moments like the one that is now playing out in Illinois are extraordinarily rare. While the partisan brinkmanship now taking place in Springfield over the state’s education funding bill is actually quite common, the opportunity to transform the lives of low-income students across the state is actually quite unique.

The Atlantic
Why the myth of meritocracy hurts kids of color
Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

U.S. News & World Report
Education inequality starts early
Opinion by Sara Mead, partner with Bellwether Education Partners
Upper-middle-class American professionals spend a lot on their children’s education and development. That fact – hardly news to anyone who has spent time with such parents – has gotten a lot of media attention lately, thanks to a new book by Brookings scholar Richard Reeves and a David Brooks column. Reeves’ contention – that affluent professionals’ investments in their kids serve to entrench a system of education-based privilege that makes it very hard for children from less advantaged backgrounds to advance up the socioeconomic ladder – has spurred heated debates on mainstream and social media.